The book begins with a multipaged cast of characters, which includes sections for humans, American foxhounds, horses, foxes...
An older community of Virginians competes with exhaustively detailed descriptions of fox hunting to investigate the mysterious return of one of their own.
Given her many years of experience as the Master of the Jefferson Hunt, Jane "Sister" Arnold thought she had seen it all, but a video her friend Marion finds on her phone after having left it behind at the Hunting Hall of Fame has her doubting herself. The video appears to be a selfie taken by none other than Wesley "Weevil" Carruthers, who disappeared in a hunt back in 1954, never to be seen again. To make matters worse, he doesn't appear to have aged a day since then, right down to his rendition of “Gone to Ground” on a cow horn. Sister would dismiss the video if it were the only evidence of Weevil’s return, but he appears to be picking up exactly where he left off as the playboy of his day, making social rounds among the fox-hunting crew and leaving Sister to ask why he’s come back—and whether he's a ghost. Although this mystery ruffles the feathers of the older members of the fox-hunting group, which ranges in age up to 100, Sister’s friend and protégée Tootie Harris is more distracted by news arriving from home in the form of ex-model Yvonne Harris, the mother who hasn’t offered her much support since she left Princeton for the fox-hunting life. Now Yvonne is determined to make amends and perhaps make an ally of Tootie as she prepares for a messy divorce from her husband and Tootie’s father, businessman Victor Harris. As Brown (Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, 2014, etc.) presents painstakingly accurate details of the fox hunts—which she assures her readers are humane—Sister toils to unravel the mystery of Weevil’s return while ensuring that Tootie and Yvonne don’t unravel.
The book begins with a multipaged cast of characters, which includes sections for humans, American foxhounds, horses, foxes (red), foxes (gray), birds, and Sister’s house pets and a separate glossary of useful terms. These should help identify potential readers who will enjoy a mild mystery filled with lovingly painted details—while deterring the uninterested.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17834-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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