Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction may not be impressed, but there’s soft-boiled satisfaction to the departmental...
Relegated to busting cops for soliciting sex, Sergeant Mike Turner (Internal Affairs, 2009) finally gets a case with real promise—a renegade cop on dubious disability linked to illegal guns and armed robbery.
The investigation broadens, uncovering a militia-like clan of thugs involved in contract killings and random violence. There’s nothing Turner hates more than abuse of the shield, and he’ll use every asset—his good looks, keen observational skills, uncanny instinct—to get closer to perpetrators, in this case using Beverly Conner, the suspect’s attractive mother, a barmaid at a law-enforcement watering hole. Turner’s magnetism proves as much curse as boon. He’s lonely, sure, and this thing that’s started back up between him and Miriam, his on-again/off-again, doesn’t sit well, especially when she moves in and begins to clutter up his apartment. But when the suspect’s mom falls for him, routine undercover work heats up. Worse still, turns out Miriam’s been involved with the primary suspect, putting her loyalty in question. The investigation expands but, almost as quickly, a botched bust meant to generate leads on two cops who’ve gone on the lam jeopardizes the careers of Turner and his fellow investigators. As if his professional and love lives aren’t stressful enough, lack of separation between the two is going to put him in his grave. His neighbor, a senior ex-cop who walks Turner’s dog and doles out love advice, faces relocation to a retirement home at the behest of his son, a police commander. This sets Turner at odds with a superior and gets him an unlikely housemate. Meanwhile, his partners—the apocryphal Reggie, constantly filling notebooks which Turner would love to get his hands on, and the volatile Miller, prone to act before he thinks—are a source of concern in a close-knit department where a concealed identity risks exposure and death at every step. Suspects disappear. Alleged conspirators turn up dead. The circle of corruption and murder expands beyond the Los Angeles city limits. Ultimately, Turner’s Achilles heel is his heart. Surrounded by perverts and sycophants, he wants to make things right for his neighbor, for the woman in his life and for the victims of escalating, senseless violence, but the bad guys are too close to the people close to his heart. His pursuit of these wolves in sheep’s clothing goes beyond the thin blue line of duty.
Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction may not be impressed, but there’s soft-boiled satisfaction to the departmental intrigue and the meting out of justice, Sergeant Turner–style.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-200-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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