The only disappointment is that the appropriately lurid cover illustration doesn’t come close to representing any of the...
A year after premiering Gardner’s long-unpublished second case—under the pseudonym A.A. Fair (The Knife Slipped, 2016)—for private investigator Bertha Cool and her operative, Donald Lam, Hard Case reprints the second case for the team that actually made it into print back in 1940—and it’s a doozy.
Over 20 years ago, Dr. James C. Lintig and his wife, Amelia Rosa Lintig, disappeared from Oakview, California, in the middle of a heated divorce suit in which each accused the other of infidelity. Now a client demurely identifying himself as Mr. Smith wants Cool and Lam to track down the missing woman, though he’s less interested in her presumably still-estranged husband. Arriving in Oakview, Donald quickly develops several promising leads, but some of them lead to the wrong places. His queries attract the attention of a menacing stranger who knocks him out and kidnaps him from his hotel, and for every new item he digs up about Amelia Lintig, he uncovers an unwelcome new tidbit about the client himself, who shows every sign of a self-destructive streak a mile wide—a trait echoed this time by Donald’s boss, whose inability to trust her canny op backfires, leading the duo into a murky area between a town full of crooked politicians and a murder rap. A more detailed summary would give away too much about a tale that depends on a wonderfully pulpy milieu, a breathless pace, and a nested series of surprises so rapid that you hardly have time to get used to each one before Gardner springs the next. By the end, however, you’ll sympathize with Bertha’s complaint that “I’ve ceased to be a detective and become an accomplice” and agree with Donald that “a lot of heat has been turned on.”
The only disappointment is that the appropriately lurid cover illustration doesn’t come close to representing any of the many felonies that actually go down. If they’re looking to please fans, Hard Case could do worse than continue the series till they’ve reprinted every one of the firm’s 29 adventures.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78565-617-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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