The tale unfolds realistically but uncompellingly, with Banks the only truly memorable character this time around.
The death of a fellow officer sends DCI Alan Banks (Bad Boy, 2010, etc.) looking for secrets in every corner of Eastvale and eventually as far afield as Estonia.
Why would someone track recently widowed DI Bill Quinn to a police convalescent center and shoot an arrow into his chest? Banks, convinced that the murder must have to do with one of Quinn’s old cases, isn’t sure which case holds the key until a second murder provides the clue. Mihkel Lepikson, a freelance journalist from the Estonian town of Tallinn, bonded with Quinn six years ago when they both investigated the disappearance of Rachel Hewitt, a bridesmaid who got separated from the rest of her hen party during a pub crawl in Tallinn and was never seen again. Now the reporter is dead, evidently tortured and drowned in a building that’s most recently been used to warehouse the immigrants brought into the country to work for the substandard wages Roderick Flinders’ employment agency pays and then railroaded into dead-end loans by obliging shark Warren Corrigan. Most disturbing of all for Banks, however, is that he’s sent to Estonia not with DI Annie Cabbot, just returned from her own long convalescence, but with Inspector Joanna Passero of Professional Standards, who’s been attached to the investigation to determine whether Bill Quinn might have been a bent copper. Robinson cuts back and forth between Banks and Passero’s adventures in Estonia and Annie’s inquiries back home. The result is a patient unraveling of sad but unsurprising developments that provide Rachel’s parents with that most overrated of all aspects of justice: closure.
The tale unfolds realistically but uncompellingly, with Banks the only truly memorable character this time around.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-200480-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
IN THE NEWS
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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