Dozens of twists and a couple of first-class shocks, but it all trails off like an endless fireworks display that keeps...
Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist who recently knocked 'em dead at the bijou (The Bone Collector, 1997), is back, sweating to rescue a pair of kidnapped Tarheelers from the insect-loving kid who's snatched them.
Lured to North Carolina by the promise of some experimental surgery that might allow him to move more than his head and a single finger, Rhyme is on hand, along with his protégé Amelia Sachs, when Sheriff Jim Bell gets the news that Garrett Hanlon, the troubled teenager who already killed fellow-student Billy Stail and dragged Mary Beth McConnell off to the back of beyond, has returned to abduct nurse Lydia Johansson as well. Analyzing the scanty trace evidence with all his usual rigor, Rhyme, using Sachs as his eyes and nose at the crime scene, dopes out where the Insect Boy must be taking his victims, and Sachs, joined by Bell's deputies, races a trio of moronic moonshiners bent on a reward Mary Beth's mother has offered to catch up with Hanlon first. The case would be closed if this were anybody but devious Deaver. But the arrest is only his cue to turn up the heat, as Rhyme and Sachs duke it out over Hanlon's guilt, and their conflict leaves Sachs on the run with Hanlon in custody, or vice versa. As former allies turn against each other, Deaver shows loyalties dissolving and reforming in record time. But the effect of this double-time quadrille is more ingenious than illuminating; Rhyme's forensic work is more dogged than gripping; and the galaxy of junior-league threats who take the place of Deaver's usual sociopathic monsters (The Devil's Teardrop, 1999, etc.) are no more threatening than a cloud of pesky mosquitoes.
Dozens of twists and a couple of first-class shocks, but it all trails off like an endless fireworks display that keeps exploding into bangs and blossoms even after you've started to look for your car. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild Main Selection.)Pub Date: May 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85563-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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