Not the strongest outing for the memorably shellshocked sleuth (Racing the Devil, 2017, etc.). The suspects are shadowy and...
Inspector Ian Rutledge’s 20th appearance finds him fighting for control of a case no one wants him to solve.
Left unexpectedly at loose ends by his sister Frances’ wedding, Rutledge, who’s taken several days’ leave from Scotland Yard, drives off into the night and doesn’t stop until he comes upon another motorcar in the middle of the road and a woman alongside it with blood on her hands. Elizabeth MacRae tells Rutledge a wildly improbable story: a stranger stepped out into the road, stopped the vehicle, and then, after the briefest possible exchange, shot Elizabeth’s companion, bookseller Stephen Wentworth, in the heart and ran off. Rutledge insists that the Yard be called in so he can snatch the case away from local Inspector Larry Reed. Reed, only two weeks married himself, is not pleased at being bypassed in favor of a man who may have been the first officer on the scene but was present as a witness rather than an officer, and the two men repeatedly clash. It’s just as well that they do, for despite its name, things remain eerily quiet around the village of Wolfpit as Rutledge, driven by an anonymous accusation of Wentworth as a murderer who deserved his fate, begins his questioning. The dead man may have been impulsive—he returned from the Great War, purchased a bookshop from an old friend, and then suddenly took a trip to Peru—but he seems to have had no enemies except his monstrous mother, who’s always blamed him for the death of his twin brother when they were both just 6 months old. Progress on the case is produced not by Rutledge’s inquiries but by two more shootings, all linked, it becomes increasingly evident, to a medieval treatise on apples.
Not the strongest outing for the memorably shellshocked sleuth (Racing the Devil, 2017, etc.). The suspects are shadowy and indistinct, the detection is slow, and the murders are both less interesting and less potent than the mystery foreshadowed by Todd’s title.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267871-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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