The result reads like a stranger-than-strange collaboration between Lee Child, handling the assault on the CIA with baleful...
The seventh of Wortham’s Red River mysteries brings a pair of sinister intruders into Center Springs, Texas, in 1969 to launch a crime so monstrous that two of the town’s patriarchs will have to travel far from home to avenge it.
Pilot Curtis Gaines has been hired to spray water filled with what a pair of government agents calling themselves Mr. Brown and Mr. Green tell him is water infused with “microscopic metal particles our scientists call ‘Gold Dust’ " over Lamar County. In fact, the Gold Dust is actually a combination of bacillus globigii and bacillus subtilis. Though it’s thought to be harmless, it actually has a toxic effect on anybody frail and elderly, like centenarian elevator operator Jules Benton, or anybody with asthma, like Constable Ned Parker’s teenage grandson Top, or anybody whose system has been weakened by a recent surgery, like Curtis himself. Apart from the sudden outbreak of mysterious illnesses, Ned, along with Deputy Anna Sloan and retired Texas Ranger Tom Bell, recently returned from a sojourn in Mexico thought to have left him dead, has to contend with a pair of murderous cattle rustlers and the rumor, spitefully initiated by Top’s nearly identical female cousin, Pepper, that there’s a treasure in gold buried close by. While Wortham (Unraveled, 2016, etc.) is still introducing more relatives and hangers-on to the Parkers in Center Springs, Ned, infuriated as his grandson hovers near death, decides to go directly to the CIA in Washington to get vengeance. Tom joins him on the 1,200-mile drive and the unlikely game of polecat-and-mouse that unfolds in a series of developments as preposterous as they are richly enjoyable.
The result reads like a stranger-than-strange collaboration between Lee Child, handling the assault on the CIA with baleful directness, and Steven F. Havill, genially reporting on the regulars back home.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0961-1
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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