A Gorky Park sequel that finds Arkady Renko, disgraced Moscow cop-hero of that 1981 best seller, hiding out on a Russian factory ship (the Polar Star)—and up to his dour ears in an intricately textured but slow-drifting mess of murder, drug smuggling, and political intrigue. Tossed into a psychiatric ward for the "political unreliability" he evinced in Gorky Park, Arkady has escaped to Siberia and is now toiling on the "slime line" of a giant floating food-processing plant, part of a joint Soviet-US venture in the Bering Strait. When the stabbed body of female crew member Zina Patiashvili surfaces with the fishing nets, the ship's captain asks reluctant Arkady to investigate. Troubles crowd in at once: pressure from the Ship's political officer to declare the murder an accident or suicide; resentment by crews both Yank and Russian of Arkady's bulldogged questioning; a scary attempt by unknown assasilants on Arkady's life by locking him into a deep-freezer. A docking by the Polar Star at the American base of Dutch Harbor brings a second attempt and reveals a mortal enemy—Karp Korobetz, a hard-core criminal whom Arkady arrested for murder years before in Moscow and who now locks Arkady into a burning cabin. But fire proves no more fatal than ice to our hero, who busts out and who, as the Polar Star heads north into the ice pack, divides his time between hiding from Karp (most effectively, in the bed of American crew rep Susan Hightower); unraveling an espionage subplot; and digging out Zina's killer—not Karp, but one of Karp's Yank partners in a drug-smuggling conspiracy. Two violent deaths—one a bizarre suicide—climax the novel and lead to Arkady's professional and political redemption. As with Gorky Park, here it's the myriad glimpses of Soviet life that matter most: the Christmas-like wonder on the faces of Soviet sailors surveying electronic goods in an American store; the psychological insights ("Russian men saw themselves as wolves, lean and wild"), the details of food, talk, sex. But gone is the prequel's vigor and kink, and Arkady's charisma too: he's fully fleshed but tired, just like the mystery/suspense element. A distinguished chiller, then, but not a particularly enjoyable one—like good vodka gone warm.
Pub Date: July 17, 1989
ISBN: 0345498178
Page Count: 402
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989
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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