A rollicking, cozy escapade, too lighthearted to call Tartan noir.
In the 1950s, the murder of a boy shocks a Scottish town still reeling from the devastations of World War II and rife with resentment of outsiders. This is the first book in a suspense series set in the Scottish Highlands, where the author was born and raised.
The daughters of Joanne Ross, typist for The Highland Gazette, mischievously ring doorbells and run, but when they coax little Jamie to play their game, he disappears and later turns up dead. The coroner’s examination shows that the boy had been “interfered with” prior to death. Meanwhile, visions of a hoodie crow, a nightmarish, folkloric figure said to peck out the eyes of newborn lambs, haunt Joanne’s youngest. It seems her daughters were the last to see “wee Jamie.” Indeed, their imaginations have created the crow from the shadowy figure they saw take their classmate. The night of the murder, a Pole jumped ship in the harbor and was aided by a Polish immigrant engaged to the daughter of a local Italian immigrant family, as well as by the Tinkers, the traveling people of Scotland, used to being regarded with suspicion. Prejudice and xenophobia make the Pole the prime suspect, and it appears he’ll be condemned on circumstantial evidence. This doesn’t sit well for several Highland Gazette staffers, especially veteran journalist McAllister. McAllister indulges his hunches, journalistic and otherwise, to turn up another suspect, the town priest who ran a boxing club for boys back in Glasgow. Meanwhile, Joanne, coping with an abusive, alcoholic spouse, tries to make sense of her youngest daughter’s terrified outbursts at the sight of any resemblance to the hoodie crow, outbursts that appall the religiously stolid townies. By the time Joanne and McAllister realize the girls actually are critical witnesses, they’ve clammed up. The story is a twisted tangle with sometimes unsubstantiated forensics, and it’s a bit of a stretch that the girls’ status as important witnesses goes largely ignored. But this mystery is a delight to unravel, with its lively dialect-spouting players, inhabiting a lavishly described, forbidding but beautiful landscape.
A rollicking, cozy escapade, too lighthearted to call Tartan noir.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5493-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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