Relentless pacing, tight plotting, and a brainy, idiosyncratic new hero make this one a winner.
The FBI brings in astrophysicist, amputee, and former agent Dr. Lucas Page when a sniper takes aim in the middle of a New York blizzard.
It’s almost Christmas, and Columbia professor Lucas Page is looking forward to getting away from his students and spending a couple of weeks with his wife, Erin, a pediatric surgeon, and their four, soon to be five, adoptive children. It’s not to be. A sniper has killed Lucas’ old FBI partner, Doug Hartke, and Special Agent in Charge Brett Kehoe asks Lucas to use his unusual talent to tell him where the shot came from. It’s been a decade since the incident that nearly killed Lucas and cost him an arm, a leg, and an eye, but he can still pull off what, to others, seems like an impossible trick: In a blink, he can see the city as a “matrix of interconnected digits, a mosaic of numbers that stretched to the horizon.” It’s a singular talent that makes him a hot commodity in what turns out to be a doozy of a case. After all, making the shot that killed Doug Hartke “would be like trying to thread a needle while riding a mechanical bull set to Motörhead.” The eerily talented sniper continues to take out cops at an inhuman pace, and the FBI has a suspect, but Lucas doesn’t believe they’ve got the right guy and enlists a few of his sharpest students to help him find a connection between the victims. The cat-and-mouse game that follows takes Lucas to his limits and beyond and puts his family firmly in the crosshairs. Investing in Dr. Lucas Page and his extraordinary family is ridiculously easy, and, crankiness aside, he has a solid core of decency that shines through. Lucas is surrounded by genuinely interesting supporting characters, such as his de facto partner Agent Whitaker, who has a preternatural talent for anticipating what Lucas is thinking, and Dingo, a fellow amputee and former BBC combat photographer who lives over the Pages’ garage. Keep an eye out for a heart-pounding sequence involving Dingo and an actual broadsword. Pobi’s (American Woman, 2014, etc.) keen attention to the mechanics and challenges involved in having multiple prostheses is a plus, although readers will have to wait to find out more about the incident that caused Lucas’ life-altering injuries.
Relentless pacing, tight plotting, and a brainy, idiosyncratic new hero make this one a winner.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29394-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
