Hall’s cautionary tale of a femme fatale boasts crackerjack storytelling, vibrant characters, and some terrific twists.
A willful and provocative beauty drives every man within her orbit to distraction, and one to murder, in a novel that was first published to great acclaim in 1950.
Each of the tale’s five sections focuses on a different character, all of them with hard-luck stories. The first begins as a broken Jack Ward sits in jail. Having confessed to the murder of an unnamed woman, he tells his court-appointed lawyer that all he wants is the gas chamber. Next Hall (Warlock, 1958, etc.) flashes back to Depression-era southern California, where Baird, a distressed rancher, is trying to keep his gorgeous and unruly teenage daughter, Vassilia, from running wild. Denton, a wealthy neighboring rancher, garners her affection by buying V a beautiful horse. When he offers to pay for V’s college education, claiming that he loves her like a daughter, Baird is unwilling to deny his generosity. The next section focuses on Ben Proctor, a small-time politico and roommate of Jack Ward, who’s dating V. Despite himself, Ben finds himself undeniably drawn to V, something Jack seems frustratingly oblivious to, often inviting him to join them. Whether her flirtatiousness is a form of friendly attention or something more, this arrangement can’t end well. Then the story jumps to Marian Huber, who adds another angle through her husband Arch’s friendship with Jack Ward, who’s newly married to naïve Gene Geary. Marian doesn’t think that supersweet Gene is a good match for erratic Jack, but when she spots him with a voluptuous temptress, she feels duty-bound to inform the innocent newlywed.
Hall’s cautionary tale of a femme fatale boasts crackerjack storytelling, vibrant characters, and some terrific twists.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78565-688-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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