A moody and absorbing detective story.
A high-profile treasure hunt monopolizes headlines as a serial killer roams the London streets in Chancellor’s (The Forgotten Echo, 2012, etc.) thriller.
Callum Relph, a wealthy American expatriate in England, posts a YouTube video of himself burying what he claims is the legendary sword Excalibur. To find it, citizens must decipher clues using the ExcaliburQuest app, or they could happen upon one of seven golden tickets hidden around the country, each worth £500,000. If the puzzle remains unsolved in five days, the seven ticket holders will be brought to the area where the sword’s hidden and compete to dig it up. Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Frank Moke is working a murder case in which the killer severed the victim’s thumbs—the same M.O. as a serial killer called “Scissorman,” who hasn’t been active in nearly 20 years. Back then, Moke arrested a man who went to prison for the murders of six girls, although the high court subsequently acquitted him on appeal, due to questionable evidence. The detective gets help in the present-day case from rookie police officer Morgan Luttrell, and she and Moke soon determine that the killer’s latest murder may have been inspired by ongoing media coverage of the Excalibur game. Despite its length, Chancellor’s tale maintains a steady pace throughout. The characters’ backstories gradually unfold in snippets, rather than as prolonged exposition. Various mysteries about specific characters develop over the course of the story; the public knows little about Relph, Luttrell keeps a secret from Moke, and it’s revealed that George Eagle, a profiler who worked the older case, later had “some kind of breakdown.” Intermittent scenes from the killer’s perspective become more unnerving in the novel’s latter half, when he’s holding someone captive for a frighteningly unclear purpose. This is Chancellor’s first adult thriller (he previously wrote children’s books) and although it’s occasionally violent, it more often relies on atmosphere. A description of an old crime scene, for instance, merely hints at earlier savagery: “The dark patch of dried blood in the middle of the carpet was still covered by a sheet of plastic.”
A moody and absorbing detective story.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9996319-0-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: One Line Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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