An exciting adventure set against some of the West’s most stunning landscapes. Cleverly interwoven with the true story of...
A tragic accidental death, a suicide, and a probable murder roil the waters in prime Montana fishing country.
Freida Toliver and her husband, Chuck, are out looking for shed antlers for Freida’s chandelier business when they’re overtaken by a snowstorm and a whopping drop in temperature. Chuck survives by shooting his horse and crawling into the carcass for warmth, but Freida and her horse vanish in the storm. Though a rescue party finds her in a bear den, she dies on the way to the hospital. Sheriff Martha Ettinger loses a finger trying and failing to prevent Chuck’s suicide. When Martha and Sean Stranahan—watercolorist, fishing guide, part-time detective, and her sometime lover (Buffalo Jump Blues, 2016, etc.)—return to the scene to retrieve the pair’s valuable saddles, they run into Wilhelm Winkler, who claims to be Freida’s adoptive brother. Found in Freida’s vest was a fly wallet marked EH and filled with very old flies. Patrick Willoughby and Kenneth Winston, Sean’s friends at the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club, suggest that the wallet may have belonged to Ernest Hemingway. The writer lost an entire trunk of valuable trout fishing gear and possibly the start of a novel, and a letter Willoughby just received hints that someone may have found it. After Willoughby hires Sean to meet with the unsigned letter writer, he and a Plott hound belonging to a local woman find Winkler dead along the riverbank. Returning to the scene with his friend Sam, he finds Winkler’s fly rod, which was evidently custom-built for Hemingway. Sean continues to hunt for the missing trunk, finds that chandeliers were the least of Freida’s business endeavors, and travels as far as Michigan in search of further information. He uncovers a tangled web of clues while trying to balance his burgeoning relationship with Martha.
An exciting adventure set against some of the West’s most stunning landscapes. Cleverly interwoven with the true story of Hemingway’s lost trunk, it goes far to elucidate the mystique of fly-fishing.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-42960-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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