Despite uneven pacing and a couple of creaky plot devices, Bess’ seventh case (An Unwilling Accomplice, 2014, etc.) does its...
A nursing sister in the last days of World War I tries to help a man belatedly accused of murder.
When Bess Crawfor, of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, encounters her former patient Maj. Mark Ashton in Canterbury, he invites her to stay with him and his parents at their ancestral home in nearby Cranbourne. She accepts but soon realizes she’s come at a bad time. An explosion in the Ashton powder mill two years ago has turned the Cranbourne villagers against the family. Although the army had commandeered the mill from Mark’s father, Philip, and ignored his warnings not to push production too hard, Philip is still blamed for the disaster. But Bess is as puzzled as the Ashtons about why the villagers should suddenly become even more agitated—and why Philip should be arrested so long after the deaths of the millworkers. When Bess returns to the front in France, she tracks down the one witness who actually saw the explosion. But he won’t request leave from the army to come back to England and testify. Instead, Bess returns to Cranbourne to question the villagers, whose reasons for harassing the Ashtons range from conspiracy theories to resentment of perceived wrongs during the reign of Henry VIII to beliefs in an angry water deity. Even so, Bess is certain that one person has found a way to unite them in hatred of the Ashtons. She must juggle her search for facts with her nursing duties in France, as soldiers maim and kill one another for futile possession of inches of land. Even when someone at the hospital tries to murder Bess, it doesn’t stop her efforts to find the man behind the campaign to see Philip Ashton hanged.
Despite uneven pacing and a couple of creaky plot devices, Bess’ seventh case (An Unwilling Accomplice, 2014, etc.) does its strong, determined heroine credit.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238624-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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