A thousand thrills, a dozen hairpin turns, more overripe suspects than you can shake a warrant at and a near-total lack of...
Though Carolyn Sullivan has been promoted to division manager of the Ventura County Probation Department and is about to marry Mr. Right, her woes continue when a top investigator is killed.
Veronica Campbell is on the skids. Painfully aware that her husband Drew no longer loves her and strung out by the impossible demands of her depressing caseload and her four children, she’s been fabricating interviews she should be taping and basing her recommendations on hunches instead of evidence. But all that ends the day she’s shot to death at the Motor Inn. Veronica was certainly depressed enough to have taken her own life. But Carolyn (Sullivan’s Justice, 2005, etc.) is convinced her old friend was killed by person or persons unknown—a belief that’s bolstered by a series of shocking revelations by Veronica’s hell-raising daughter Jude. A drug-using high-school dropout who was twice pregnant before she turned 18, Jude sends the investigation into a startling new direction by a fusillade of accusations directed variously against her father and her sometime boyfriend, Reggie Stockton. The trouble with Jude’s stories is that she changes them constantly. No sooner has Carolyn, who’s taken the potty-mouthed waif into her home, hauled her into a deposition than Jude recants her accusations and disappears with the court reporter’s credit card. And Reggie, it turns out, is just as slippery, changing his autobiography to suit the weather. Two more murders will turn up the temperature but do nothing to clarify the mystery, which just keeps getting muddier and muddier. The only thing that’s clear is that Carolyn’s imminent marriage to millionaire computer consultant Marcus Wright is unlikely to go off as planned.
A thousand thrills, a dozen hairpin turns, more overripe suspects than you can shake a warrant at and a near-total lack of coherence once the dust has cleared.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7582-1303-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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