Tense, enchanting and beautiful.
A great-aunt’s disappearance forces a troubled woman to confront her painful past.
This gripping story is narrated largely by Towner Whitney, a self-confessed liar. She suffers from hallucinations, admits to being crazy and has large chunks missing from her memory. When her great-aunt Eva disappears, Towner leaves Los Angeles for her native Salem, Mass., to unravel a past as twisted as the lace she and her female family members use to see glimpses of the future. Reading lace isn’t the only unusual behavior the Whitney women engage in. In fact, the entire family is known around town for their odd behavior, quirky even by Salem standards. There’s May, Towner’s mother, who helps battered women on a secluded island populated by a pack of wild golden retrievers, and Eva herself, who speaks only in clichés. Soon after her return, Towner finds herself in the center of a deeper mystery when another woman disappears: Angela Rickey, a runaway teen who fell in with the Calvinists, a fundamentalist Puritan cult headed by Cal Boynton, an abusive former alcoholic who was once married to Towner’s Aunt Emma. The entire town is sure that he was involved in one or both of the disappearances, but not even determined cop John Rafferty can find any evidence to support the rumors. Meanwhile, Towner is haunted by memories of Lyndley, her twin sister, whose death had a profound impact on her psyche. If they’re to figure out what has happened to Eva and Angela, Towner and Rafferty are going to have to decide what’s real and what exists only in Towner’s mind. As told through Towner’s skewed perspective, this is beautifully written and absolutely engrossing. The sense of place is almost palpable. The town is captured in detail, but it’s a slightly unreal Salem, one where tiny acts of magic happen every day.
Tense, enchanting and beautiful.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9791593-0-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
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
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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