Beautifully written, sprinkled with sarcasm, and engrossing; ordinary people haunted by the past and coping with the present.
A reluctant sheriff must contend with the discovery of one long-missing corpse and two new murders in this second installment of a four-volume series.
Gus Salt dreamed of becoming a writer until war erupted. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Harr County, North Carolina, police department needed recruits. Fifteen years later, he is still the sheriff, and the Levoy plantation is experiencing a sudden rash of untimely deaths. Gus’ sometime girlfriend, young Blossom Hall, is about to have her steamy first novel released by a staid Boston publishing house, and editor Kate Shaw has come to Levoy to confer with her new client. The two women stumble on the partially buried bones of Dr. Whittle, a disgraced Civil War Confederate soldier who killed seven prisoners he was supposed to be escorting to jail. Then local photographer Henry Slack is found shot in his car, and things are about to get even worse. The novel isn’t a traditional mystery—readers know who the killers are. The question is whether or not Gus will unearth the truth and bring the perpetrators to justice. The strength of the gently paced plotline rests in the gradual revelations of the guilty secrets, large and small, carried by a hefty ensemble cast. The magic comes from Brookhouse’s (A Pinch of Salt, 2017, etc.) evocative prose: “The air was full of the damp traces that linger in old Southern houses, the smell of paper and fabric and wood and all the artifacts bequeathed generation to generation.” He can capture the essence of a character with just a few words. Readers quickly understand the nature of Piney Nix even before meeting him; they learn that a small sign on his front door proclaims “Trade with the Klan.” But Gus remains an intriguing cipher. He has been introspective of late, but the author does not grant readers access to the sheriff’s thoughts. Gus is a man of few words—which makes the promised next installment even more enticing.
Beautifully written, sprinkled with sarcasm, and engrossing; ordinary people haunted by the past and coping with the present.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9978686-1-6
Page Count: 153
Publisher: Safe Harbor Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
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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