The solution, when it arrives, is satisfying enough. But it’s the group portrait of the Monday-night therapy group, the most...
Billingham sets aside his bestselling chronicles of DI Tom Thorne (Time of Death, 2015, etc.) to train a laser-sharp focus on the world’s worst therapy group.
There’s no such thing as an ex-addict, and North London therapist Tony De Silva knows that the best he can hope for is that the members of his Monday night group learn to manage their addictions well enough to remain functioning adults. But even that seems like a lot to ask of this particular group. Anesthesiologist Dr. Robin Joffe has been reduced to a consultancy since the death of his son, something he refuses to talk about. Heather Finlay is burdened by a sorry history with both drink and drugs. Diana Knight’s perfect domestic world came crashing down when her husband took up with a girlfriend who’s now triumphantly pregnant. Flamboyant male model Chris Clemence seems less interested in recovery than in striking poses and provoking the other members of the group. Newcomer Caroline Armitage, who clearly has issues with food, seems mainly to serve as a fresh target for Chris’ taunts. The hothouse atmosphere turns even uglier when Heather, who’s missed several weekly sessions since her birthday party, is discovered brutally murdered. How brutally is hard to tell, since DI Nicola Tanner, who’s heading the investigation, doesn’t leak many details. Neither does Billingham, who’s clearly less interested in Tanner’s present-day investigation, presented in a conventional past tense, than the dozens of incendiary flashbacks leading up to the murder, dramatically but perversely set forth in the present tense. The result is to create a boiling Petri dish of alliances forged, strained, and broken amid the background of nonstop, sometimes knife-edged conflict.
The solution, when it arrives, is satisfying enough. But it’s the group portrait of the Monday-night therapy group, the most mismatched set of intimates since your own last family gathering, that lingers longest in the memory.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2525-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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