Begins strong with crackling sibling tensions before sliding into predictability and incest-ridden melodrama.
In this combination murder mystery/family saga from Lewis (Speak Softly, She Can Hear, 2005), a seemingly close-knit New England WASP family turns out to be riddled with resentments and secrets.
Widower Jasper is the patriarch of the established, moneyed Carteret family of Hartford. Because Jasper sold the family business, oldest son William works in PR and mountain climbs with his easygoing girlfriend Ruth. Oldest daughter Tinker has grown from a bossy, goody-goody child into a control-freak housewife who secretly gorges herself on sweets. Middle daughter Mira teaches creative writing part-time while putting on bohemian airs full-time. Pony, the spunky, beloved youngest, is raising her infant son Andrew, the product of a one-night stand with a stranger. One afternoon Pony asks William to visit her at the Vermont lake house where the Carterets spend their happiest times. After showing him a picture of their dead mother Olivia taken in 1968, with a man who is not Jasper, Pony says she has another surprise for William, but they argue and he leaves. Hours later Pony drowns in what seems an accident. Learning that the teenager next door saw another man visit Pony after he left, William pursues the possibility that foul play was involved in Pony’s death. Meanwhile, Tinker takes over care of Andrew, although Pony requested William as his guardian, and Mira becomes involved with a strangely solicitous mourner at Pony’s funeral named Keith. By the time Keith offers Mira and Tinker false and nefarious statements about Pony’s relationship to William, the reader can pretty much guess where the plot is going. William’s prickly relationship to Jasper is multifaceted, but Tinker and Mira remain generally annoying personalities, particularly in contrast to the saintly Ruth. Central to Carteret family dynamics, and to the plot, is Olivia, who never comes into clear focus even as her dramatic history is revealed.
Begins strong with crackling sibling tensions before sliding into predictability and incest-ridden melodrama.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9145-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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