A low-concept small-town procedural that delivers more authenticity than suspense, with so many forgettable suspects,...
An unwelcome discovery Rina Lazarus makes on a woodsy trail begins what feels like an endless new investigation for her husband, Greenbury Police Detective Peter Decker (The Theory of Death, 2015, etc.).
The skeletal hand Rina steps on has clearly been buried, not entirely successfully, for years, and the first challenge for the little Greenbury force is to figure out who the victim was and which of the fictitious Five Colleges she came from. The initial assumption that the corpse is female turns out to be only half-right, or both right and wrong: it’s Lawrence Pettigrew, who dropped out of Morse McKinley seven years ago for the gender reassignment surgery that would make her Lorraine. Pettigrew’s ambiguous gender status—she identified as female and took female hormones but never went through with the last surgical procedure that would have completed her transition—is only the first of several intriguing matters Kellerman raises but doesn’t resolve. Instead, the case circles back to the past when another corpse is improbably discovered 100 yards away: that of Delilah Occum, who vanished from Clarion College three years ago. It’s a good thing Rina can use her contacts at Hillel to supply Decker and his very junior partner, Harvard Law student Tyler McAdams, with a list of students who’ve gone missing from the Five Colleges over the years, because there’s no sign that the murders are over, and everyone in the area, from charismatic professors to drug suppliers to horny boyfriends, seems to be involved. The wide net Decker is forced to cast leads to false starts, dead ends, and eventually multiple arrests and several far more satisfying hours of sweating the perps in interrogation rooms just in time for Rina to turn away from her much-remarked handguns (are you listening, Anton Chekhov?) and start cooking for Rosh Hashana.
A low-concept small-town procedural that delivers more authenticity than suspense, with so many forgettable suspects, witnesses, and potential victims that you’ll need a grade book to keep them straight.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242496-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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