An action-packed story of triumph over adversity.
A boy who likes to wander and dogs that live to find the missing add up to an exciting adventure in rural Vermont.
Still mourning the death of her fiance in Afghanistan but comforted by Elvis, his bomb-sniffing dog, Mercy Carr has formed an attachment to Game Warden Troy Warner and his search dog, Susie Bear, who were her partners in solving a murder (A Borrowing of Bones, 2018). When she hears shots, Mercy tracks Elvis, who’s vanished into the woods owned by Daniel Feinberg, her wealthy friend and neighbor. Feinberg’s hunting party has found a large bear in the tree to which groundskeeper Gunnar Moe’s pack of Norwegian elkhounds chased him. But Elvis has turned up something even more disturbing: a young woman with an arrow in her chest. The dead woman is Alice de Clare, an architect and weekend guest of Daniel’s who’s been working with his other guests—Blake and Katharine Montgomery, Caspar and Cara Farrow, Lea Sanders and Ethan Jenkins—on a project to renovate the Bluffing Bear Inn. Mercy’s discoveries continue when she finds a pajama-clad boy in the woods who may be a witness to murder. The boy is Henry Jenkins, an autistic 9-year-old math genius who speaks little but knows much and finds the dogs calming. As Troy well knows, the woods are beautiful but menacing, occupied by the most dangerous beasts, human lawbreakers. Even so, Mercy believes that the killer is most likely one of Feinberg’s guests, most of whom have been friends ever since they attended prep school together. Certain that the headline-seeking State Police detective will get everything wrong, Mercy and Troy use Feinberg's estate as a base for hunting the killer. Their most difficult task is protecting Henry, whose wandering is a danger to himself and the people and dogs who guard him.
An action-packed story of triumph over adversity.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15305-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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