Dedicated readers may relish exploring this unusual branch of the military, but not necessarily the impersonal story in...
A suspenseful first novel from biotechnologist and nonfiction author Andrews (Body Bazaar, 2001, etc.) offers within a workmanlike plot an insiders’ look into the armed-services pathology lab.
A serial killer is on the loose, strangling and raping women and then tattooing their breasts, until the death of one high-profile victim, and friend of President Bradley Cotter himself, drives the government into action. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) handles forensics work for the military, and its arrogant new head, Colonel Jack Wiatt, assigns geneticist Dr. Alex Blake to head the “Tattoo Killer” team. Thirty-something, “beguiling” but not intellectual, the child of a Vietnam vet killed in action, Alex is a dedicated sequencer of DNA, but resentful of being forced to take on the strangler case. Alex is at loose ends after struggling through an unraveled relationship, and fed up with the sexism that seems to be endemic to her line of work. But she forges on and employs her detective powers, discovering, for instance, that the killer used a cherry-flavored condom; more difficult is demonstrating to Wiatt that she is a team player. In fact, Alex spends much of her time testifying in front of a congressional committee defending the beleaguered AFIP, where she meets the handsome bachelor congressman from Texas, David Thorne, himself on the rebound from his failed relationship with an older, divorced senator. On a hunch, Alex suggests that the armed-forces genetic pool be tested against a specimen from the killer, and the result points to Admiral Kenneth Mason, who turns out to have the same creepy tattoo on his breast. But while the DNA isn’t exact, it is overlapping—meaning a relative might be involved. Andrews attempts to bring out the human story behind Alex’s work—developing her friendship with colleague Barbara and her deaf teenaged daughter, Lana—though the author is more skillful at handling the political and technical aspects of her story, such as backroom wheeling-and-dealing in the Rayburn House Office Building.
Dedicated readers may relish exploring this unusual branch of the military, but not necessarily the impersonal story in which it’s couched.Pub Date: June 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35270-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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