English Professor Alison Bergeron (Third Degree, 2010, etc.) gets stuck with another crap assignment when St. Thomas’ basketball coach buys it during a game.
Already in her boss’s crosshairs for embarrassing the university by repeatedly stumbling across dead bodies, Alison is St. Thomas’ go-to gal for jobs nobody wants. In addition to teaching a bazillion sections of freshman composition, she’s served time at a local soup kitchen (Quick Study, 2008) and as interim residence hall director (Final Exam, 2009). Now Sister Mary is seeing red just because Paul, the campus mailman, has been found dead in the trunk of Alison’s car. So when Michael Kovacs, coach of the women’s basketball team, dies of a heart attack during a particularly dismal game, who better to take the helm of the Blue Jays than five-foot-ten Alison, who played for St. Thomas as an undergrad? The silver lining is that coaching brings Alison closer to her stepdaughter Meaghan, the taller and gentler of her detective husband Crawford’s twins. (A good thing, since petite, prickly Erin hates her dad’s new wife.) The cloud is that the Blue Jays suck. Even with the help of best friend Max Rayfield’s husband, former All-City star Fred Wyatt, Alison can’t buy a win. Not even high scorer Kristy Bianco can propel her team to victory, especially after her father is beaten senseless in an apparent robbery. But Alison suspects that the attack on Lou Bianco wasn’t a random act of violence, and worse, that it may have something to do with her friend Father Kevin McManus’ banishment as St. Thomas’ chaplain. Connecting the dots is made harder by the double distractions of her coaching duties and Crawford’s strange new remoteness. But Alison doesn’t leave the job half done—no matter how many extra jobs she picks up.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59329-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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