A compelling, action-packed thriller simmering with intrigue, suspense, and twisty mystery.
In Coburn’s mystery novel, a young woman dedicates her life to solving her mother’s murder.
In 1986, when good-natured graduating high school senior Charlotte “Charlie” Purdue comes home from school one day, her world is forever changed. First, her father, a local log cabin contractor, speeds out of town after telling his daughter that “leaving now is the only way I know to keep you safe.” Then, she discovers her mother’s murdered corpse, and things begin to spin out of control. The police of Concrete, Washington, have no leads, and when local boys find evidence that her father drowned in a local river, Charlotte accepts her fate as a grieving daughter but vows to find out what happened—despite small-town Concrete’s local gossipmongers, who’ve drawn their own conclusions. When Charlie thinks she sees her father in a low-budget movie, she immediately heads off to Hollywood to investigate. Things get murkier once she arrives and insinuates herself into the windswept desert set of a low-budget “zombie epic,” edging ever closer to finding her father while encountering a “cauldron of intrigues” blocking her path, including fake priests, seasoned actors, and a math whiz who writes in Russian Cyrillic text. The author is exacting in his depiction of Charlie, a gun-toting girl who exhibits the tenacity and diligence of a seasoned police investigator; as the story grows darker and more suspenseful, Charlie emerges as rock-solid in her determination. Gritty and immersively entertaining, Coburn’s novel draws readers into the movie-set melodrama as the book’s narrative momentum consistently picks up speed. The author has some difficulty with scene transitions, which can be jarring, but he makes up for these rocky shifts with convincing, authentic emotional nuances and dangerous situations that establish Charlie as a fierce protagonist.
A compelling, action-packed thriller simmering with intrigue, suspense, and twisty mystery.Pub Date: March 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781509253388
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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