Hobbled only by a monotonously terse style, Gayle’s follow-up to Idyll Threats (2015) is believable in both characterization...
A kidnapped boy disrupts a small Connecticut town’s holiday season.
As harassing calls and death threats attest, Idyll doesn’t appear entirely ready for a gay chief of police in 1997. After nearly a year, Chief Thomas Lynch, a former NYC homicide detective, still doesn’t feel quite comfortable in his rural community despite its Christmas-card charm. When 6-year-old Cody Forrand vanishes in the snow, Lynch tries to focus on the job and not the fallout from coming out to his staff. A rare neurological condition that makes Cody impervious to pain means he won’t know when he’s getting too cold for safety even if he has, as his parents hope, simply gone outside to play. As hours pass, worry mounts that the boy was abducted, and Lynch loses points for not organizing a more effective search party and not calling in a rescue dog he didn’t know the staff had. Cody’s sudden reappearance outside a grocery store in a Hartford suburb raises more questions than it answers. His memories of being lured into a car by a person disguised as his favorite TV hero are blurred and perhaps not even accurate thanks to the drugs he was dosed with. What’s even more puzzling is that the kidnapper took him farther south before turning north again and dumping him. Even after Cody’s safe return, Lynch still hopes to find the perp—and to solve the case of a candy store break-in, collar an arsonist, and discover who spray-painted FAG on his Crown Vic. Then Cody disappears again. With the help of the FBI, including a handsome agent who takes more than a professional interest in Lynch, and clues ranging from a car with an “old lady” smell to an ill-fitting mask and a cocker spaniel puppy, Lynch begins to think the unthinkable about the second kidnapping.
Hobbled only by a monotonously terse style, Gayle’s follow-up to Idyll Threats (2015) is believable in both characterization and the ebb and flow of police detection.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63388-357-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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