A gritty thriller with convincing details, but the feel-good conclusion undermines the effort.
Good cops and bad cops, good burglars and bad burglars, murder and mayhem in Washington, D.C.
Author Swinson is himself a retired detective, and familiarity with policing and crime, and an eye for detail, provides a solid framework for the story as Frank Marr, a retired D.C. narcotics detective–turned–private eye, makes a second appearance (The Second Girl, 2016, etc.) in this cocaine-fueled caper. Marr is a cokehead who feeds his habit partly through his assignments, shaking down dealers or burgling the homes of those he has under surveillance. As the book opens, he's turned a sweet trick: he can confirm to his Aunt Linda that her college-student son, Jeffrey, is indeed dealing dope and has a plan to steal the dope while Jeffrey is in class. But while Marr is breaking into Jeffrey’s apartment, Jeffrey is burgling Marr’s place and is killed in the process. Of course Marr must conceal the real facts from his old friends on the force, complicating their investigations. Sleuthing on his own, Marr identifies one burglar and the driver of the cab that is used to carry the stolen items to be fenced. He pressures these two, the details begin to emerge, and the trail leads to a dirty cop and an old grudge. All this while Marr continues to feed his habit and at every turn has to face the question of how his addiction will be maintained. Though he claims early in the book that his relationship with lawyer Leslie Costello matters most to him (“Last thing I want to do is fuck it up with her. You don’t get that many chances in life”), in fact she figures only slightly in the narrative, and by the end, the relationship is in shambles. This is consistent with the real agenda of addiction; Marr cares more about blow than anything else and illustrates this in other situations. But it is just that consistency that makes the ending so unsatisfying. Though Marr manages to arrange some measure of justice for some of the characters, the body count is high; he never confronts the destruction of his relationship with Leslie; and he seems to think he can ride off into a drug-free sunset, with all accounts squared.
A gritty thriller with convincing details, but the feel-good conclusion undermines the effort.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-26421-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
