A masterly procedural with erudite characters and a nasty sting in the tail.
Several grisly murders provide a thorny problem for experienced detectives.
DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap of the Brighton division are seconded to the short-staffed Lewes District just in time to catch the case of a body in a lake. The neighbor who found the dead man, his throat cut, identifies him as Maj. Richard Rabbitt, owner of the Plumpton Down Estate but not the lake, which belongs to Nimue Grace, whom Bellamy immediately recognizes as a well-known actress who’s gone into seclusion. Rabbitt was much disliked by his neighbors; his estranged wife, Liesl, and his sister, Tallulah, were no great fans either. They learn from Tallulah that Rabbitt and his putative business partners, Said Farzi and William Simpson, were trying to buy Nimue’s property. Simpson is well known to them as a smooth crook who almost ruined Gilchrist’s career and that of her former lover, Brighton Police Commissioner Bob Watts (Swimming With the Dead, 2019, etc.). When they interview Nimue, they find her more than willing to help and are soon under the spell of her stunning beauty, charm, and considerable intellect. But dredging her lake reveals nothing more than a group of empty white plastic containers firmly attached to the shore which Nimue denies ever having seen. Farzi is not only Nimue’s apparently wealthy neighbor, but also a slum landlord and a major danger to her. When a man is found beaten to death in one of Farzi’s Brighton apartments, the police suspect that Farzi and Simpson are involved in importing drugs and slave laborers. Gilchrist and Heap are assigned to solve the Brighton murder while a very stupid colleague is switched to Rabbitt’s case, but, refusing to leave Nimue’s fate in his hands, they slyly keep up their investigation into what turns out to be a complex series of deep-rooted crimes.
A masterly procedural with erudite characters and a nasty sting in the tail.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8967-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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