A lively mystery with some structural problems and a demonstrable love of its setting.
A veteran Santa Monica policeman who is nearing retirement chronicles some of his more recent and colorful cases in this debut mystery.
Officer Gwyn Jones is 55 years old and not looking forward to retirement. He has been a policeman in Southern California for decades but holds the dubious honor of never receiving a promotion. Undeterred, he decides to write down some stories from his case files and several scenes from daily life involving his wife, Barbie Jones (“the All-Seeing Eye”), and his architect son, John. A Santa Monica native, Gwyn remembers less-gentrified days, when gang wars broke out; drug use was rampant; and Venice was just as dismal as its neighboring city. These days, cases are a bit more genteel, if no less deadly. An older woman’s personal trainer lies dead at her feet after falling down the stairs to Santa Monica Canyon. Or was he pushed? Gwyn’s rival Dan Aintree arrests a conveniently placed fellow personal trainer, but Gwyn’s got a different idea. If he can quickly arrest the right person, he might finally get that promotion he so desires. Whether in this case or several others, Gwyn finds that discovering the truth on his own is much easier than watching others get it wrong. Borresen’s breezy mystery, made up of a series of unique police investigations, starts off strongly, with a well-described protagonist who is from a long line of police officers and a family that’s been in California since the Gold Rush. The upbeat tone is engaging, but there are some glitches with the premise. Multiple cases in one novel lead to thin characterizations and underdeveloped storylines. In addition, Gwyn is a lifelong patrol officer who is operating outside of his purview, sometimes in homicide cases, with detectives in parallel investigations. The attempts at resolving this situation are often awkward and insufficient.
A lively mystery with some structural problems and a demonstrable love of its setting.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73440-470-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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