Hechtman’s lucky 13th is a character-driven cozy whose mystery is solid enough to raise it above the average.
An exciting new opportunity is fraught with unexpected problems.
Molly Pink and Adele Abrams both work at Shedd & Royal Books and More, whose More is a yarn/crafts area. When the Craftee Channel wants to film their new show Creating with Crochet at the store, their boss asks Molly to act as the contact person, affronting Adele, who considers herself the crochet expert and is a bit of a drama queen. The show has hired as host former teen star Rory Graham, whose crocheting abilities are nil. Hoping to get more air time, Adele agrees to teach her but finds Rory a most reluctant learner. Molly, a widow who lives with several dogs and cats and sometimes her musician son, has been dating prominent lawyer Mason Fields ever since her relationship with Homicide Detective Barry Greenberg foundered on her inability to stay out of detecting (On the Hook, 2018, etc.) and his inability to put anything ahead of his job. Meanwhile, the store is a meeting place for the Tarzana Hookers, whose newest members are Connie Richards and Marianne Freeman. Connie seems to be a companion for Marianne, a quiet woman with noticeable problems focusing. When Molly goes to Marianne’s house to return some crocheting she left at the store, the cops, including Barry, are already there because Connie’s been electrocuted on the lawn, maybe accidentally, maybe not. Disagreeing with his partner, who thinks Marianne is guilty, Barry secretly visits Molly to get more information. Her sleuthing reveals that Marianne is on oodles of pills her overprotective brother Errol has forced her to take for some nervous problems. Errol also insists that Marianne have a minder and wants her to sell the valuable property she lives on. Can Molly possibly identify the person who killed Connie and keep the crochet show from disaster while juggling two boyfriends?
Hechtman’s lucky 13th is a character-driven cozy whose mystery is solid enough to raise it above the average.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-884-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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