The mixture is as before, with a bit less of everything except suspects and red herrings.
The latest from Clark (The Sleeping Beauty Killer, 2016, etc.) is retro even for her: the maiden voyage of a trans-Atlantic ship crammed with more beautiful people, gossips, thieves, and killers than Death on the Nile—or her own daughter Carol Higgins Clark’s 1992 debut, Decked.
If you don’t already know, billionaire owner Gregory Morrison will be happy to tell you that the Queen Charlotte is the most luxurious ship to take to the seas since the Titanic. Among its stratospherically upscale appointments are invited lecturers Henry Longworth (Shakespeare) and Celia Kilbride (gemology) and a passenger list that includes Lady Emily Haywood, who owns the fabulous but famously cursed Cleopatra emerald necklace; her companion, Brenda Martin; her investment adviser, Roger Pearson, and Roger’s wife, Yvonne; Kansas divorcée Anna DeMille, who won the cruise in a church raffle; Ted Cavanaugh, an attorney trying to get Lady Em to return the necklace to Egypt; “the man with one thousand faces,” who’s bent on stealing the necklace; and Devon Michaelson, the Interpol agent charged with protecting the necklace. How does this all work out? After two murderous attacks, Morrison tells Michaelson in some exasperation, “Well, I must say you’ve done a lousy job,” and it’s hard to disagree. On the other hand, the accommodations are superb, the food and drinks unexcelled, the lectures informative, and the necklace safer than you might think because the thief keeps attacking its keepers just after they’ve passed it off to someone else. Long-ago lottery winners Alvirah and Willy Meehan, familiar to Clark fans (The Lottery Winner, 1994, etc.), are on hand to celebrate their 45th anniversary and provide what Alvirah considers great detective work, though even fans may be unimpressed on this score.
The mixture is as before, with a bit less of everything except suspects and red herrings.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3111-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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