Deeply researched and engrossing, this masterful series opener leaves readers hanging—Rats!—so they’ll eagerly await the...
With her first full-length novel in 10 years, an award-winning British crime writer launches a series about the Black Death.
In the summer of 1348, Sir Richard of Develish journeys to Bradmayne on business. While he’s away, news reaches Develish of a deadly pestilence. His wife, Lady Anne, brings her serfs within the moat of her manor house and then wisely refuses her husband’s re-entry, fearing he will bring the disease with him. She’s a woman ahead of her time, dismissing as superstition the idea of “a plague sent by God.” Years before, she’d had sewage pits dug well downwind of Develish; other villages didn’t dig any at all. Anne’s compassion for her serfs contrasts sharply with the attitude of her 14-year-old daughter, Eleanor, who hates everyone but her father and likes having serfs whipped. The living conditions in Bradmayne are vile; one might think “Men urinated where they stood” would say it all about a village, but the author spares no detail in showing what grossness causes stench and attracts vermin. People seem not to connect these godawful conditions with the “killing sickness in the village” that carries “a deadly pestilence with putrid boils” and requires the digging of mass graves. Before he succumbs, Sir Richard observes that “In twelve days, the world had changed beyond all recognition.” Yet no one knows how extensive that changed world is. Lady Anne has the serf Thaddeus Thurkell lead a small band of brave serfs to learn how other villages have fared. She is the central figure in this compelling saga in which people are either all virtuous and wise or all the opposite. While the serf Gyles Startout is a man of “courage and generosity,” Lady Eleanor opines how sweet it would be if he dies. As the plague continues at book’s end, Lady Anne still faces a dangerous enemy in her daughter.
Deeply researched and engrossing, this masterful series opener leaves readers hanging—Rats!—so they’ll eagerly await the sequel.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6931-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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