The vast storehouse of characters and interwoven subplots will challenge readers new and old to Pandian (The Elusive Elixir,...
An alchemist is eager to answer a call for help her long-vanished mentor may have concealed within a painting even though pursuing it may force her to disclose her alchemical identity.
An admirer of professions involving skill, passion, and talent, Zoe Faust is mesmerized by a painting at the memorial exhibition of recently deceased Logan Magnus that’s remarkably lifelike in its representation. She’s convinced that this portrait of Nicolas Flamel and his wife, Perenelle, must have been painted by someone who knew the couple firsthand, though they’ve been dead more than 100 years. As an alchemist who’s been alive for centuries, Zoe’s capable of believing the impossible, beginning with the life she shares with her friend and roommate Dorian Robert-Houdin, a living gargoyle. Zoe wishes she could ask Magnus how he knew Nicolas Flamel, who was her alchemical teacher and mentor years before he suddenly disappeared. Although Magnus is a literal dead end, Zoe suspects Flamel’s left a message asking for her assistance. Unable to seek help from her boyfriend, Portland police officer Max Liu, with whom she’s never shared the secret of her true self, she relies instead on the only other alchemist she knows, Tobias Freeman. Tobias is visiting after the recent death of his wife, Rosa, and Max and his colleagues believe there’s something suspicious about his presence in town. Zoe’s more focused on how Tobias can help her track Flamel, though as they come to believe that Magnus was likely murdered by someone who was asking the same question, they feel the danger to themselves. As Max asks questions that make it harder to keep her alchemy practice secret, Zoe has to decide whether now’s the time to reveal who she really is in order to rescue the man who helped her become an alchemist.
The vast storehouse of characters and interwoven subplots will challenge readers new and old to Pandian (The Elusive Elixir, 2017 etc.), who seems more intent on opening doors she’s kept carefully locked until now than on making the new developments pay off.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5301-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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