McCullough (The Touch, 2003, etc.) has achieved a passably engrossing police procedural.
Serial killer terrorizes Connecticut in veteran author McCullough’s debut thriller.
Set in 1965–66 in Holloman (i.e., New Haven), where racial tensions are beginning to roil, the action ignites from the chance discovery of a dismembered, racially mixed female corpse in a refrigerator used for storing incinerator-bound dead animals. The defunct critters were subjects of neurological studies conducted at the Hughlings Jackson Center, nicknamed the Hug. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico quarantines the Hug and interrogates its staff, “the Huggers,” including the statuesque jolie-laide Desdemona Dupre. Meanwhile, Wesley le Clerc, a Hugger nephew, exploits the gruesome find to help his mentor, Mohammed el Nesr, foment racial unrest. The investigation drags on in real-time tedium because Ivy League politics must be needlessly explicated and the POVs of far too many potential culprits (not a few conveniently equipped with private lairs) superficially mined. Since ’63, Carmine learns, several teenaged girls with café-au-lait complexions and sheltered upbringings have disappeared. These bodies presumably went up in smoke in the animal incinerator. As bimonthly abductions occur, all Connecticut is on high alert against the so-called Monster, dubbed the Ghost by cops. A 16-year-old is taken from a supposedly locked-down high school and two other girls vanish, now in monthly succession, despite massive surveillance of all Hugger homes and haunts. The killer has gone against type with a darker-skinned black and a white Lebanese victim, each found headless, and dressed in child’s beaded frocks, which Carmine finds were purchased with 1933-issue $100 bills. Forensic examinations reveal that all the victims were sadistically raped, but trace evidence is non-existent in these pre-DNA-testing days. Tipped off to some sinister family skeletons, Carmine identifies the common link all the victims share. After a successful police sting, Wesley le Clerc pulls a Jack Ruby on the prime suspect. Cheated of justice, Carmine settles down to married life with Desdemona, satisfied at least that he has banished the Ghost. Or has he?
McCullough (The Touch, 2003, etc.) has achieved a passably engrossing police procedural.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8642-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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