If you have time for only one mystery, one Western, and one SF this year, this will ding all three targets.
Hold onto your hats. A fatal but otherwise routine accident in rural California turns out to be not exactly either one.
Fired from the LAPD over an affair with a junior officer, Beth McDade has to settle for working as a detective for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office in Barstow. The town has its share of burglaries and such, but Beth’s latest case is something else entirely. A ghostly figure has appeared screaming out of thin air and run into the path of a mobile home outside Peggy Sue’s in Yermo one stormy night. The dead man has no identifying papers, and the contents of his pockets all date from the 1880s. The weirdness is only intensified by the discovery of a skeleton that seems to be that of missing chef and food writer Owen Slader, even though pregnant coroner Amanda Selby identifies it as a century old despite its Tommy Bahama shirt and state-of-the-art dental and orthopedic implants. So what’s going on here? Beth’s increasingly bewildered inquiries lead her to focus on the history of the Calico silver mine, which flourished more than a century ago, and the possibility that the best place to get answers may be the nearby Marine Corps Logistics Base, whose security chief, Bill Knox, is another of Beth’s ex-flings. The Marines, being Marines, aren’t eager to enlighten her, and she’s left searching for leads while the story follows Owen in the days before his remains are discovered, into worlds that will seriously challenge readers’ suspension of disbelief even as they expand the boundaries of the police procedural in rip-roaring ways.
If you have time for only one mystery, one Western, and one SF this year, this will ding all three targets.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781448310135
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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
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