On the other hand, Dolan has provided a seven-course banquet for readers with a taste for deliriously overplotted pulp with...
Dolan’s debut thriller begins simply enough, with two men burying a third in a forested section of Ann Arbor’s Marshall Park. From there, it gets ever more loopy, far-fetched and baroque.
Rolling stone David Loogan (not his real name) has been working as an editor for the literary magazine Gray Streets. He has a good relationship with his boss, Tom Kristoll, and an even better relationship with his boss’s wife. But he’s a secretive man who keeps to himself, and that doesn’t change when Tom asks him to help dispose of a body. Michael Beccanti was an ex-con with a long history of break-ins who came to his office to rob him, Tom explains; he bashed the intruder in self-defense. It’s not long before David discovers that Tom’s story is a tissue of lies, but by then the body is resting in Ann Arbor’s good green earth, followed shortly by the remains of Tom, who allegedly took a header out his office window. Police detective Elizabeth Waishkey, not fooled by the suicide angle, identifies the obvious suspect in Tom’s murder just in time to hear that he’s died as well, apparently by his own hand. Though David and Elizabeth are clearly attracted to one another, their investigations take them in separate directions, a divergence that becomes even more pronounced when a retired New York cop turns up with a story about David’s past that sends his quarry packing. Although the resulting tale fits Tom’s definition of Gray Streets fiction—“Plans go wrong, bad things happen, people die”—Elizabeth keeps telling David that “this isn’t a story in Gray Streets,” and she’s right. There are far too many violent deaths, plot twists, ghostwriters, red herrings, guilty secrets, false theories, unconnected murderers, come-from-nowhere revelations and 11th-hour switcheroos for any self-respecting literary journal.
On the other hand, Dolan has provided a seven-course banquet for readers with a taste for deliriously overplotted pulp with just enough polish to keep them from feeling guilty.Pub Date: July 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15563-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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