A complex and riveting parallax view of domestic crimes, decades apart.
The 1892 story of accused axe murderer Lizzie Borden (and her maid) intersects with that of a domestic’s daughter in 2016.
Bridget, maid to the Borden family of Fall River, Massachusetts, has long been aware that there is something “off” about the Bordens, particularly the younger spinster daughter, Lizzie. Needing to send money home to her family in Ireland, however, she's convinced by Abby Borden to stay on. She feels sympathy for Mrs. Borden, the second wife of miserly mill owner Andrew Borden, who's never won the affection of her husband's eldest daughter, Emma. Emma, who still remembers her late mother, has also turned Lizzie, who doesn’t, against their stepmother. Cut to 2016. Brooke (real name Felicita), a Mexican-American woman whose mother, Magdalena, a housekeeper, died when she was 13, is on the run. After aging out of foster care, she’s in the latest of many apartments, under the latest of many assumed names, working the latest menial, under-the-table job. The reason for all this subterfuge emerges in flashbacks: years ago, the night Magdalena’s affair with her wealthy employer was exposed, the employer’s wife drowned. Brooke is convinced that the employer’s two sons were responsible for Magdalena’s "accidental" death and that now they are after her: she's received sinister messages reminding her that “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Genealogy sites reveal that Brooke's absent father, known on her birth certificate only as “Dirtbag,” was a Belgian exchange student and a descendant of an illegitimate child of none other than Lizzie Borden, who fled to Europe to give birth. Thus these parallel stories converge. The reimagination of the many grievances that possibly stoked Lizzie’s murderous rage is fascinating, but the extensive rehash of the familiar forensics surrounding the infamous “40 whacks” overshadows more intriguing questions surrounding the legitimacy of Brooke’s paranoia. The period-esque language of the 1890s portions is mostly convincing if at times overly ornate.
A complex and riveting parallax view of domestic crimes, decades apart.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9970664-4-9
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Bonhomie Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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