The city of Oaxaca, lively, dark and under threat, plays a starring role in this satisfying mystery.
When a suspicious gas leak blows up his favorite doughnut shop, a retired American expat bumbles into a mystery in Mexico.
Robert Evans doesn’t love the nickname he’s earned in his adopted hometown of Oaxaca, but he can’t shake Santo Gordo, the crime-fighting alter ego who inevitably finds himself entangled in suspicious events the corrupt authorities prefer to ignore. Also, his sizable girth nets him a special steel-reinforced chair at his favorite bakery. In this, Evans’ second outing, the pink pastelería explodes minutes after he leaves with his sugary breakfast. His friend Efraím, head of the powerful local cabbies union and driver himself of an ancient, immaculate taxi, asks Evans to investigate (the bakery belonged to Efraím’s uncle). Evans also agrees to handle a sensitive inquiry for his estranged daughter, Randy, a commandingly efficient do-gooder who suspects that a nonprofit she represents is actually a front for a two-bit fraudster. The father and daughter begin to repair their relationship, even as Evans’ slow unraveling of his other case threatens to undermine it, revealing the bakery was targeted by an American company wanting to do for fair-trade chocolate what Starbucks did for coffee. Randy thinks the company will improve life in Mexico, while Evans worries its corporate version of “doing good” will flatten Oaxaca’s citizens, since its motivations and effects are likely apiece with the American-style malls on the city’s outskirts that “threatened to siphon off everyone local and turn the downtown zócalo into a tourist Disney-Mex attraction.” The conspiracy never stretches beyond the demolished bakery, making for a plot that, like Oaxaca’s cinnamon-laced, water-based hot chocolate, is spicy but thin. Still, Evans’ love for the city feels real, grounded in details like the taste of chicken mole, the opening hours of the English-language library and the rococo infant Jesus in his landlady’s Christmas Nativity. Kerns (Santo Gordo: A Killing in Oaxaca, 2012) describes a slow-moving town where the walled compounds cannot forever shut out the winds of globalization.
The city of Oaxaca, lively, dark and under threat, plays a starring role in this satisfying mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492263845
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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