A folksy, slightly formulaic crime novel set in mid-century Virginia.
A haunted vet plays private investigator in Gates’ debut crime novel.
King George County, Virginia, 1959: World War II vet Harry Cogbill has just lost his job at the pickle factory due to his disrespectful attitude and short temper. He’s been battling a recent case of insomnia, which means he’s awake when a woman pulls up to his house shortly after dawn. Ethel Burkitt, a 20-something local farmer’s daughter, wants to hire Harry as a private investigator—a job for which his only qualification is that he was once a prison guard. It seems Ethel’s uncle, Jack Pope, is selling the family’s small, rural airport, and Ethel doesn’t like the look of the men who are trying to buy it. Harry agrees to look into it—he’s got a bit of a crush on Ethel from the start, and he hasn’t got much else going on aside from caring for the fox cub he just adopted. As Harry starts inquiring into the sale of the airfield, it’s clear that everyone he speaks to is lying to him…and a few go so far as to threaten him. With fears of the Greek mafia’s incursion into the Northern Neck and his feelings for Ethel growing by the day, Harry sets out to prevent the Burkitts from losing their land—and their lives. But will the traumas of his wartime past prevent him from taking action? Gates writes with a great sense of local color and humor. When an outsider asks Harry, “What you guys do for fun around here? You got like, barn dances and stuff?” the protagonist deadpans, “You’re thinking of Oklahoma…This is Virginia. We mostly grow tobacco and write the Declaration of Independence.” Harry certainly fits an archetype, and much of the plot, like his and Ethel’s immediate attraction, feels a bit too preordained. Even so, plenty of readers will be attracted to this Southern tale of a broken man with something to prove and a reason for proving it.
A folksy, slightly formulaic crime novel set in mid-century Virginia.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2019
ISBN: 9780359440382
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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