This is vintage Martin Cruz Smith. Fans of Arkady Renko will be pleased.
The latest in the Russian crime series featuring detective Arkady Renko (Tatiana, 2013, etc.) takes the reader to forlorn Siberia and frozen Lake Baikal.
Renko is Investigator of Special Cases in Moscow. When his girlfriend, Tatiana—an investigative journalist who receives plenty of hate mail and death threats—doesn't arrive home as expected on the Trans-Siberian Express, he’s worried about her. She had gone to Irkutsk, deep inside Siberia, to research a story about oligarch Mikhail Kuznetsov, “who is not only running for president…he’s running for his life.” It’s a story that could make her famous but could also get her killed, so Renko wants to know she is safe. Totally wrapped up in her project, she neglects to let him know she plans to stay there a while longer. So when Renko’s superior sends him to Siberia to report back about Kuznetsov, “a known enemy of the people,” and to interrogate a Chechen prisoner accused of attempted murder, the trip fits in well with his need to find Tatiana and reassure himself that she's OK. She doesn't communicate much, though, making her “a very difficult person to be in love with.” On the flight to Irkutsk he meets Rinchin Bolot, who quickly becomes his factotum, or jack-of-all-trades. “What’s a factotum?” Renko is asked. “I’m not sure, but I seem to have one.” Bolot is a great character with a wry sense of humor. More importantly, he is a many-faceted asset to Renko: “Bolot was an iceberg, all bright surfaces and hidden depths.” For his part, Renko is decent, smart, and appealing, hardly a stereotypical tough guy. And when he’s confronted by an enormous bear, his shooting skills could use sharpening. The story appropriately ends with the Siberian dilemma, where one person faces a terrible choice. Everything just feels Russian, as though the author hikes to his hut from the taiga, warms his frozen fingers at the wood stove, pours himself a vodka, and sits down to type.
This is vintage Martin Cruz Smith. Fans of Arkady Renko will be pleased.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4025-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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