Joanna Trollope with a bit of blood.
Extramarital indulgence with a long-lost flame makes just pots and pots of trouble for an otherwise blameless British businessman.
It just couldn’t be more troubling, really. Here’s poor Hugh Wellesley, soldiering away, trying to keep the family glassworks from falling into the hands of a heartless corporation with plans to close the scrappy, hardworking company that Wellesley’s dad set up and send its loyal workers out into the cold post-Thatcher world. Then, just as Hugh’s almost got the financing scraped together from bloodsucking investors for a buyout, the corpse of Sylvie, a half-French nymphet who bewitched him years before and then bewitched him again just a few months ago, has washed up in the river Dart, stabbed and wrapped in polythene. What could have possessed Hugh to let himself be distracted by that dishy but drug-riddled Gallic siren? Well, of course, Hugh blames himself for spending far too much time and energy on the business, leaving him weakened and vulnerable, but he can’t help also blaming his wife Ginny just a bit. Asthmatic, hyperorganized, far too interested in the shallow world of charity events and lesser nobles, absorbed in the endless upkeep of the country house and the city house and the house in Provence, spending zillions faster than Hugh can make it, Ginny is just not doing her part in this time of crisis. Too bad they couldn’t have led the happy life of Hugh’s brother David, a small-town GP whose frumpy wife Mary seems so very supportive. And now here come the Exeter police to drag Hugh away from those important banking meetings just at the worst possible time. Is David a suspect? Alas, not a very successful sneak, he had been seen puddling about on the family yacht with Sylvie, and he can’t account for all the time around her murder. But neither can the possibly psychotic Ginny. There will be mild surprises in this curiously dated thriller from the author of Deceit (2001).
Joanna Trollope with a bit of blood.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-290-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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