The Swinging ’60s give Runcie’s sleuth in a cassock plenty of opportunity to stick his memorable nose in where it isn’t...
Six interrelated new stories about the crime-solving priest who struggles with his own frailties.
The Venerable Sidney Chambers, Archdeacon of Ely, is already facing at least one of “The Dangers of Temptation” in trying to give up alcohol for Lent when a deliberately provocative ex-parishioner who asks his help with her son draws Sidney and his friend Inspector Geordie Keating into the brutal murder of the leader of a commune dubbed the “Family of Love.” A post-finals celebration for students at the University of Cambridge gets out of hand in “Grantchester Meadows,” in which a cattle stampede and a missing heirloom necklace call on Sidney’s crime-busting talents. “The Trouble with Amanda” is Sidney’s former flame Amanda Richmond’s husband, Henry, whose disturbed and disturbing ex-wife suddenly drowns. Even if Sidney can prove that Henry isn’t guilty, what does the news mean for the Richmonds’ marriage? In “The Return,” Sidney’s former housekeeper gets the shock of her life when her long-lost husband reappears for unknown reasons and tempts Sidney into a flutter at the horse races. “A German Summer” is a holiday for Sidney and his family on the East German island where Sidney’s wife spent her summers as a child. Sidney endangers his own safety by trying to solve a crime everyone else wants him to leave alone. In “Love and Duty,” it’s nearly Lent again, and again Sidney plans to stop drinking at the same time he tries to bring tact to a blackmail case whose victim wants to keep his private life private. Although the stories’ allusions to free love, the moon landing, and Pink Floyd remind the reader of passing time, Sidney’s inquisitiveness, humility, and appreciation of both the sacred and the secular are as constant as in his previous adventures (Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins, 2015, etc.).
The Swinging ’60s give Runcie’s sleuth in a cassock plenty of opportunity to stick his memorable nose in where it isn’t wanted.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-566-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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