A steadily deepening historical nightmare that ends up implicating pretty much everyone in sight in a multilayered coverup....
Think V.I. Warshawski butts too many heads in Chicago? Wait till you see what happens when she and her dog, Peppy, leave the big city for the wide-open spaces of Kansas.
Angela Creedy, a hockey teammate of Bernadine Fouchard, whom Warshawki rescued last time out (Brush Back, 2015), is worried because her cousin, film student August Veriden, is accused of ransacking the Six-Points Gym, where he works as a personal trainer, and is nowhere to be found by police officers who want to ask him all about drugs. Reluctantly agreeing to look for him, Warshawski follows his trail to Lawrence, Kansas, in the company of Emmy-winning actress Emerald Ferring, who evidently believed in August so completely that she persuaded him to help her look into a hidden chapter in her past. Preliminary inquiries in Kansas link the 1983 death of Emerald’s mother, Lucinda, to an anti-nuclear protest she’d taken a vociferous role in only six weeks before. Crazy, homeless Sonia Kiel replies to one of Warshawski’s circulars seeking information about the missing pair by phoning to say that she’d seen them dancing on her true love’s grave. But by the time Warshawski shows up to meet her, she’s lying unconscious in a nearby stairwell along with student Naomi Wissenhurst. The attempt to follow up her information is thwarted by the insistence of Sonia’s parents, retired KU professor Nathan Kiel and his wife, Shirley, that Sonia’s ravings can’t be trusted and that the true love from all those years ago, grad student Matt Chastain, isn’t buried nearby and probably isn’t even dead. Even after Warshawski’s determined that the 1983 demonstration continues to have calamitous aftershocks more than 30 years later, she’s still helpless to stop a continuing series of deaths not so much mysterious as uncanny.
A steadily deepening historical nightmare that ends up implicating pretty much everyone in sight in a multilayered coverup. Whodunit purists may be frustrated at the absence of a single villain to blame, but Paretsky’s legion of fans will rejoice in her heroically scaled 20th novel.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243584-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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