The surprises are few but genuine, the police procedure appropriately grueling, and the back story jumbled but heartfelt....
A series of murders with century-old roots provides Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, of the Brighton and Hove Response Team, with another full plate.
On a dark night in Brooklyn 90 years ago, four members of the White Hand Gang, armed with baseball bats, hustled stevedore Brendan Daly out of his house after killing his wife, Sheenagh. The men left Daly’s son, Gavin, and his daughter, Aileen, alive, a Patek Philippe pocket watch their only legacy, wondering where their father disappeared to. Many years later, Aileen, now 98, is viciously attacked by home invaders who strip her Brighton home to the floorboards. Gavin, still formidable at 95, tells Grace that he doesn’t care about the millions of pounds worth of antiques the thieves made off with; he only wants that watch back. What Gavin really wants, of course, is information about his father, but Grace can’t help him there. In fact, all he can do, it seems, is watch while a series of fences and thugs are killed in the crossfire among Gavin; his estranged son, Lucas, with whom he’s seriously at odds; Lucas’ enormous Albanian henchman Augustine Krasniki, aka the Apologist; and yachtsman/gangster Eamonn Pollock. As the pot boils furiously, Grace’s domestic life is equally fraught. While he’s waiting for his wife, Sandy, who vanished 10 years ago, to be declared dead so that he can marry his live-in lover, Cleo Morey, and give her baby boy, Noah, a proper dad, Sandy is plotting her return from foreign parts. And Amis Smallbone, the longtime home invader who emerged from prison in Not Dead Yet (2012), is cackling to himself as he plots condign revenge against Grace.
The surprises are few but genuine, the police procedure appropriately grueling, and the back story jumbled but heartfelt. Middling for this strong, starchy series, which increasingly deserves to be measured against the best in the genre.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03018-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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