the-Month Club alternate selection/Quality Paperback Book Club selection)
Plausibility flies out the window early on in this black-comic caper about a North Carolina Superior Court judge's walk
on the wild side—in a first novel that actually becomes more credible and absorbing as the complications multiply and the body count rises. Evers Wheeling's separation from his embittered wife Jo has him drinking and smoking dope—and makes him easy prey for Ruth Esther English, a statuesque auto-saleswoman who offers Evers a bribe to finesse the acquittal of her brother Artis, a career lowlife soon to be tried for cocaine possession. Considering her offer seriously, Evers enlists the aid of his good- natured, underachieving brother Pascal and their drinking buddies, then heads west to help Ruth and the dim-witted Artis recover stolen money hidden away by their late father. It's nominally Salt Lake City, but we know we're in Carl Hiaasen country when Evers falls for forthright black attorney Pauletta Chai (in on the scam); Artis pulls a double-cross; Evers's Jo (remember her?) is shot to death, and Pascal cheerfully confesses to the crime. The "inverted Jenny" 1918 postage stamp, William Jennings Bryan, and an "albino charm that seems to grant wishes" are also mixed in—and this engagingly zany novel's last hundred pages open up one trapdoor after another, as Ruth Esther's "true identity" is revealed, then denied, then left hanging. Once past his jerry-built narrative’s initial absurdities (which are many, and egregious), Clark settles into a raspy, mocking, matter-of-fact rhythm that quickly wins back the reader's complicity. The author's characters are both richly grotesque and improbably credible, and the edgy, horny exchanges between Evers and Pauletta, which are filled with racial gamesmanship and dance right on the edge of tastelessness, liven things up even further. The super-high octane plot also brings back memories of Richard Condon's witty thrillers, and melodramatic farces like the late Tom McHale's all-but-forgotten Farragan's Retreat. But Clark's resourceful misadventurers are all originals. (Book-of-
the-Month Club alternate selection/Quality Paperback Book Club selection)Pub Date: April 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40725-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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