There's a minor road-trip thread, and a mystery too, but this is primarily a psychological drama driven by a lonely struggle...
Quinn (Arf, 2016, etc.) is known for caninecentric comic mysteries, but here the dog takes a supporting role as Afghanistan veteran LeAnne Hogan, marred by a disfiguring injury and PTSD, finds purpose after a close friend’s death.
A talented high school athlete, LeAnne rejects West Point after her father’s suicide. Instead, she enlists as an Army private and then serves multiple Iraq and Afghanistan tours. As co-leader of a Cultural Support Team (a unit of combat-capable female soldiers who accompany Special Ops forces to gather intelligence), LeAnne lost her right eye, leaving her with a terribly scarred face and severe PTSD. Well-written flashbacks chronicle the CST soldiers in-country and introduce an Afghan interpreter nicknamed Katie, whom LeAnne considers a kindred soul and who ends up changing her life. In the novel's present day, LeAnne is a wounded warrior in a U.S. military hospital, where she's become an intense, isolated woman prone to bouts of anger and despair. Her character changes markedly as she tries to understand her hero father’s apparent suicide and resolves to mend her contentious relationship with her mother. Then LeAnne’s stumbling recovery goes off-rail after her hospital roommate, Marci, dies suddenly. LeAnne impulsively leaves the hospital, a defiant escape that's perfectly detailed by Quinn. In a journey ripe with symbolism, LeAnne travels west, then follows a compulsion to head to Washington and connect with Marci’s daughter. Soon after she encounters a huge black dog at a dramatic moment, she learns that the child is mysteriously missing. Quinn realistically depicts the way civilians fail to comprehend a warrior’s mindset. The despondency of PTSD portrayed with such brutal intensity—LeAnne’s guarded, prickly, and cynical persona cracks but never fully opens—makes for emotionally difficult reading.
There's a minor road-trip thread, and a mystery too, but this is primarily a psychological drama driven by a lonely struggle to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1840-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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