It happened with Dick Francis, Ross Macdonald, and many others: a superb, underrated suspense writer finally achieves some wider recognition. . . just when he or she is producing weaker work. And now that seems to be the case with Ruth Rendell: this new non-detective, psycho-crime novel is a book club selection—but it's far less impressive than Rendell's recent work in either detection (Death Notes, A Sleeping Life) or crime (Make Death Love Me, A Judgement in Stone). Someone is killing young blonde women on the moors near Hilderbridge. And all evidence points the reader to central character Stephen Walby, 30—an obviously disturbed fellow who finds the first body. After all, Stephen is puritanical, impotent (though wed to nice Lyn), obsessed with the moor (he believes himself to be the illegitimate grandson of a famed moor novelist), and was long ago deserted by a blonde mother; also, he secretly locates the killer's lair—in a cave on the moor. Is Stephen himself the schizoid killer, then? Or are there two psychos wandering around the moor? Plus—things get even more complicated when Stephen clearly does kill blonde wife Lyn (who's been understandably unfaithful) and tries to pass off the murder as one of the moor killings. . . until Lyn then turns up alive (!). How can this be? Well, Rendell uses one of the creakiest of ancient, implausible plot-twists to explain Lyn's survival. And the denouement—when Stephen comes face to face with the killer in the cave-lair—will surprise no reasonably alert reader. So, despite Rendell's ever-sharp prose and the effective moor/village atmosphere, this is thin, contrived psycho-crime storytelling—without the ironic inventiveness or the psychological conviction of A Judgement in Stone (or even The Lake of Darkness); and it would be a pity if newcomers to Rendell got their first impression of her from this distinctly under-par effort.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1982
ISBN: 0345341473
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
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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