Given the severe economy of both successful criminal activity and detective work, following the easygoing footsteps of the...
Prohibition-era park ranger Timothy McIntyre comes to the rescue of a local lodge owner threatened with every conceivable sort of sabotage.
John Frye is so irascible that he’s impossible to love; his few neighbors in Rocky Mountain National Park think of his wife, Hattie, as ever suffering. But that’s no reason, or almost no reason, for someone to be firing bullets at him or setting booby traps designed to electrocute him or destroying his boiler and threatening his Small Delights Lodge with an explosion. McIntyre’s supervisor, Nick Nicholson, who knows that Frye’s been at odds for years with Catherine Croker, the widow who owns nearby Grand Harbor Lodge, wants McIntyre to put an end to their squabbling once and for all. That turns out to be a tall order for several reasons. Neither owner shows any inclination to call off the hostilities. Polly Sheldon, Hattie’s jack-of-all-trades niece, suspects that the attempts on Frye’s life are deliberate near misses intended to scare him into selling his place to Catherine, who covets it more than the fountain of youth, or to the Chicago bootleggers who’ve recently been spotted in the vicinity looking for a toehold. And there’s always the chance that Polly is wrong and that one of the attempts will succeed before McIntyre, a nice enough man but not a towering intellect, can figure out who’s behind them. Looking outside his tiny department, whose leading lights are Russ Frame, a ranger newly arrived from Yosemite, and Charlie Nevis, whose long tenure in the park still hasn’t taught him to tuck in his shirt, McIntyre joins forces with Vi Coteau, assistant to the FBI agent in Denver, for several rounds of low-level sleuthing and some even more low-level socializing.
Given the severe economy of both successful criminal activity and detective work, following the easygoing footsteps of the hero (Ranger McIntyre: Unmentionable Murders, 2018, etc.) is a lot like being on a 1920s vacation, with nothing much to do but take in the sights.Pub Date: April 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4328-5003-6
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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