High-quality crime fiction with the protagonists brought together by a dog.
Second in a series set in Deception Cove, Washington, featuring two damaged people and the dog they love.
Mason Burke, who's living in Deception Cove after having served 15 years for murder in Michigan, is pummeled by local celebrity Brock "Bad" Boyd, who doesn't like his attitude. A few days later, Boyd’s crab-chomped corpse washes ashore at Shipwreck Point with a bullet in the head. Too bad, because the former hockey star had been one of the town’s only sources of pride, never mind that he’d gone into the dogfighting business. It’s a small, down-on-its-luck town where rumors “traveled in whispers, blooming as fast as moss in the rainforest,” so police receive an anonymous tip that the doer is the nearly friendless Burke. “Somebody’s got to hang for this murder,” says one bad guy to another. And what better fall guy than an outsider with a known prison record? Then a witness comes forward to accuse Burke, who later finds the woman with her throat slashed. Burke is a suspect, but the sheriff won’t arrest him without hard evidence. Burke is romantically involved with local cop Jess Winslow, brought together by Lucy, a gentle pit bull mix that had been rescued from a dogfighting ring. Burke had worked with the dog as part of an experimental program that earned him early release from prison, and Winslow is a traumatized Marine combat veteran who later received Lucy as a companion animal. She’s a tough, upright cop, and he tries hard to avoid violence. At one point, Jess seems to face a stark choice: Your career, or the man you love. All three, Lucy included, face mortal danger. They complement each other perfectly: the veteran’s toughness, the ex-con’s humanity, and the dog’s unconditional adoration of both. All of Canadian author Laukkanen’s crime novels have tense action and layered characters—except in this case, Lucy isn’t that complex.
High-quality crime fiction with the protagonists brought together by a dog.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-44875-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
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