There’s never much doubt who’s really behind the attacks on Ian and Martha Brewer, but Nunn, who provides enough action and...
It's 1953. Although DS Emmanuel Cooper has been reassigned from Durban CID to Marshall Square in Johannesburg, his fourth case returns him uncomfortably to his roots in neighboring Sophiatown.
Teenager Cassie Brewer was at home when two thieves broke in, beat her parents badly and drove off in the family Mercedes. And she’s certain who the miscreants were: a pair of St. Bartholomew’s College students named Kibelo Nkhato and Aaron Shabalala, whom Cassie's parents—Ian, the school principal, and Martha, a secretary at the office of land management—had entertained at dinner shortly before the assault. The first suspect provides an alibi, but the second can’t, and as the evidence against him mounts, it looks like an open-and-shut case. Emmanuel (Blessed Are the Dead, 2012, etc.) would make the arrest and turn without a second thought to his Christmas vacation if Aaron Shabalala weren’t the son of his longtime friend Zulu/Shangaan DC Samuel Shabalala. If Aaron is innocent, as he claims, why is he so determined not to cooperate with the authorities, and why is Cassie so insistent that he’s guilty? Emmanuel's temporary boss, Lt. Walter Mason, congratulates him on his great work finding the stolen car and removes him from the case; but Emmanuel keeps going, joining up with his friend Samuel and Dr. Daniel Zweigman—a Holocaust survivor he's asked to treat another victim of the thieves even though that would mean crossing the color line—to find the truth. Never mind if his defiance exposes Emmanuel’s secret liaison with a mixed-race lover, Davida Ellis, and the child he’s fathered.
There’s never much doubt who’s really behind the attacks on Ian and Martha Brewer, but Nunn, who provides enough action and suspicion to keep the pot boiling, doesn’t need much of a mystery to bring the sad racial divisions of apartheid once more into sharp relief.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1696-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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