Strongly knotted, twisty airline melodrama from Nance (Medusa's Child, 1997, etc.), an air safety analyst and retired Air Force pilot who served in Vietnam and Desert Storm, still serves as a Boeing 737 captain for a major airline, and is a licensed attorney. Nance's legal background feeds as strongly into his new plot as does flying. When Captain Ken Wolfe hears that Judge Rudolph Bostich, front-runner for US Attorney General, is aboard, he vomits in the crew's restroom but manages to get control of himself. Once airborne, Ken spots a defective engine, or so he says, and does an emergency landing at an airport where he gets rid of his co-pilot on a false mission, then takes off quickly and announces that the plane has been hijacked. For several chapters, his crew and the reader think that a hijacker has indeed slipped onto the plane. Soon, however, lead flight attendant Annette Baxter discovers that Ken is alone in the locked cockpit and has himself hijacked the plane, planted a radio-controlled bomb in the bay, and is now threatening to kill all 130 passengers unless certain conditions are met. It turns out that Ken's 11-year-old daughter Melinda was murdered by a pedophile two years earlier and the alleged killer, Bradley Lumin, beat the rap because a lie by Connecticut Judge Bostich got the warrant against Lumin dismissed and let him walk—to murder more young girls, Wolfe thinks. When Ken lands to refuel, first-time FBI hostage negotiator Kat Bronsky gets aboard and begins trying to talk him out of his suicidal mission. But Ken is all too familiar with her tactics and can't be swayed: Bostich must confess, or else. Things, of course, are never that simple. Many slam-bang special effects, and the characters are unremarkable, but Nance's streamlined narrative offers some nicely nasty twists right up to a startling, and grimly appropriate, climax.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49055-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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