Stellar characters enhance this leisurely but engrossing mystery.
A former journalist’s investigation into fraud becomes a murder case in this debut novel.
At his favorite North Carolina tavern, Lassie James spots his old flame for the first time in 30 years—in the flesh, that is. The ex-reporter has seen plenty of Dr. Holly “Fats” Pike in the media. She’s a successful scientist best known for developing a cure for baldness. Now, she needs Lassie’s help; anonymous emails claim a researcher at her company is fraudulently tweaking its findings. Lassie, now a freelance writer/lyricist, can’t say no to Fats, especially since the gig pays $5 million. He uses his investigative journalist skills to peruse the company’s employee records. Before he makes much progress, one of Lassie’s old friends from the University of North Carolina winds up a murder victim. Though it seems unrelated to the fraud investigation, it turns out his friend may have had information on the anonymous emailer. Two more deaths ensue, which authorities suggest link to the first homicide. Lassie, meanwhile, looks for connections between a researcher cooking numbers and someone committing murder, which may point him directly to a killer. In Bare’s tale, the protagonist’s laid-back, first-person narration creates a measured pace. For example, his investigation primarily consists of whittling 100,000-plus employees down to a single fraudster, a methodology he unnecessarily explains three times. Nevertheless, Lassie regularly offers tidbits of insight; marrying someone, he concludes, isn’t about just finding the right person, but the ideal time as well. In addition, intriguing characters make for a consistently absorbing story. Most notable is Lassie’s tavern-owner friend, who finds an ingenious way to sell the worthless land he’s inherited. By the final act, Lassie unravels the mystery, leading to the amateur sleuth’s gratifying elucidation that checks off all the questions. His expressive song lyrics (some inspired by Fats) open each chapter in snippets and appear in full at the book’s end.
Stellar characters enhance this leisurely but engrossing mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73498-840-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2021
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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