Orr fails to capture the magic of earlier series entries (The Bad Break, 2018, etc.), and her humor is less inventive in a...
A relentless obituary writer gets a little too involved in her work while investigating murders in a small Virginia town filled with big personalities.
Tuttle Corner is rocked when not one, but two people are murdered within a single week. Not that folks were too surprised when town miscreant Justin Balzichek met an unsavory end—for him, the question had always been not whether but when—but it’s quite a surprise that noted lobbyist Dale Mountbatten’s wife, Greer, is dispatched so shortly afterward. When obituarist and generally curious person Riley Ellison goes to the local funeral home to get the facts of the unsolved cases, her efforts are hampered because her friendly funeral director has been replaced by one Ashley Campbell, a mischievous grouch who seems determined to use Riley to express his own problems. Yet Riley persists in investigating, if only because the murders appear to have chased restaurateur Rosalee Belanger out of town, and she can’t live another day without Rosalee’s croissants. Though Riley’s colleague Holman is typically a human computer, more focused on the practical than the potential, Riley notices that he’s fixated on the murders as well, and she realizes that Rosalee has the same place in Holman’s heart that croissants have in hers. It’s just as well that the current cases are occupying Riley. Her colleague and friend Flick has shown new interest in the sudden death of Riley’s grandfather several years before, and the more recent murders take Riley’s mind at least briefly off fears of what Flick may discover. Another distraction, though perhaps less welcome, is the reinvention of Regina H., who previously self-identified as Riley’s Personal Romance ConciergeTM and is actively rebranding herself as a life coach with #allthehashtags (but #noneoftheanswers, according to Riley).
Orr fails to capture the magic of earlier series entries (The Bad Break, 2018, etc.), and her humor is less inventive in a franchise that remains good but not great.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945551-46-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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