A collection of curiosities best spaced out over several sessions but still a most civilized anecdote to contemporary...
Tired of newspaper headlines that accuse cops of malfeasance or worse? Veteran editor Edwards (Continental Crimes, 2017, etc.) has the perfect antidote: 15 reprints of stories from 1908 to 1966 showing English police officers at (generally) their most sterling.
By their very nature, police procedurals unfold over an extended period. These authors haven’t got much time; their investigations generally focus on tightknit family groups instead of casting a wider net. Alice and Claude Askew’s melodramatic tale of poisoning and George R. Sims’ account of a child whose throat has been cut are of mostly historical interest. John Creasey’s heartfelt tale of Chief Inspector Roger West questioning a young boy who’s the best and only witness to the circumstances surrounding his mother’s murder has room for exactly one surprise, and Freeman Willis Crofts’ miniature inverted tale even less than that. But although readers may not expect much ingenuity in these generally stolid unravelings, the anecdote one Deptford Police Constable tells about another delivers a reliable snap in Edgar Wallace's entry; Lawrence W. Meynell provides a clue worthy of the most brilliant amateur sleuth; Leonard R. Gribble constructs and deconstructs an inventive fraud with panache; Henry Wade supplies a workmanlike killer and an even more workmanlike pair of coppers; Nicholas Blake briskly links the death of a guide dog to a more consequential murder; and Christianna Brand’s witty, heartless tale of Inspector Cockrill solving a murder among a family of thespians is predictably just as clever, page for page, as her Cockrill novels. As a bonus, Roy Vickers’ matter-of-fact tale of a bigamist brought to summary justice and Michael Gilbert’s unearthing of a long and shocking chain of murders really do carry something like the cumulative weight of a roman policier.
A collection of curiosities best spaced out over several sessions but still a most civilized anecdote to contemporary stories about the police, fictional or non-.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 1-4642-0906-5
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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