An action-packed treat for conspiracy theorists that more skeptical readers may find hard to swallow.
Venturing outside Cabot Cove, Maine, Jessica Fletcher (A Date with Murder, 2018, etc.) finds the rest of the country just as dangerous.
During a visit to New York, Jessica is approached by fellow author Thomas Rudd, who claims that their publisher, Lane Barfield, is skimming money from their royalties. When Rudd fails to show up for a meeting, Jessica has only to follow her nose to his building to find out that he was killed in an apparent gas explosion that looks suspicious to both her and her old friend NYPD lieutenant Artie Gelber. When Jessica goes to her publisher's office and tells him Rudd is dead, Barfield can barely contain his excitement about The Affair, a first novel he's just acquired from an unknown author named Benjamin Tally. He thinks it will be a blockbuster, but he asks Jessica to read it to see if she agrees. Besides the manuscript he hands over to Jessica, Barfield had a copy of The Affair on a thumb drive he says Rudd stole. Jessica asks her accountant to look into Rudd's claim about her royalties, and he thinks there may have been something odd going on—but when Barfield dies, an apparent suicide, Jessica has a bad feeling about his death, too. She goes to Barfield's office and asks his assistant, Zara, a few questions about Barfield's mood and about The Affair, but Zara can't find anything in the computer system about the book or its author. On starting to read the manuscript during her trip home, Jessica finds it so gripping that she can’t put it down. It’s a bloody and harrowing tale of a young man who's been kidnapped and brought up to be a killer by the mysterious Guardians and who saves the president’s daughter from hired killers after she overhears a dangerous secret. Two other authors Barfield asked to read the manuscript are murdered, and Jessica is attacked and left for dead in her burning house before she can finish reading her copy. Deeply shaken and highly motivated, she joins forces with Gelber and her old friend Mort Metzger, the sheriff of Cabot Cove, to uncover the truth. All the clues lead to Washington, D.C., where they reveal a series of mind-blowing secrets.
An action-packed treat for conspiracy theorists that more skeptical readers may find hard to swallow.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-48930-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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