Even the most ravenous appetites for more gruesome revelations about the Bosnian nightmare will be sated. Despite the weight...
A particularly horrific crime kicks off the fifth case for Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and the Homicide Department of the Copenhagen PD.
A shadowy man jumps from a canal bridge to a tour boat passing below, conceals himself until the time is right, then emerges from his hiding place, armed with a combat knife, and quickly kills the captain, the tour guide, and two passengers before the only other adult aboard leaps into the water even though she can’t swim. Left alone on the boat with the 16 Asian children on the tour, he strips to his bathing suit and swims away. Nor is the carnage over, for the unpiloted boat, crossing the path of another vessel unable to avoid hitting it, is cut in half, drowning most of the children. The crime would be monstrous under any circumstances, but when Simonsen’s wife and colleague, Nathalie von Rosen, aka the Countess, realizes that one of the dead is Sgt. Pauline Berg, it takes on a fiercely personal intensity. Was Pauline the killer’s primary target? Why did he choose to attack her in such a public way? What to make of the old cases to which the outrage is clearly linked when there’s every indication that telltale details of those cases were hedged, obscured, or concealed? In good time the homicide squad connects the attack to Bosnian War veteran Bjørn Lauritzen and versatile judge advocate/intelligence officer Irene Gallagher. But the resulting courtroom proceedings backfire spectacularly, with disastrous results for Simonsen (The Lake, 2017, etc.) and especially Deputy Homicide Chief Arne Pedersen, his right-hand man. A trip to Bosnia stirs up evidence of even more crimes; the corruption is so thick and pervasive, with so many heavy hitters arrayed against Homicide, that it’s something of a miracle when the case is finally closed.
Even the most ravenous appetites for more gruesome revelations about the Bosnian nightmare will be sated. Despite the weight of all this historical detail, the most powerful sequences are the very first and the very last, showing the slaughter on the canal and the final apprehension of the culprit.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-162-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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