Skillfully written, full of moral ambiguities and artful puzzles, with a spine-tingling final sentence.
A Canadian detective living in Britain pursues cases on two continents.
Chief Inspector Dominic Jejeune’s brother, Damian, who put Dominic’s career in jeopardy in A Cast of Falcons (2016), has gone missing in Colombia, where he’s wanted for causing the deaths of Indigenous people while leading a bird-watching tour. Dominic is a brilliant police officer whose outside-the-box reasoning and sudden flashes of intuitive thinking set him apart as he risks his career to help his brother. Both Jejeunes are avid birders, but when Dominic signs up for a tour with the company Damian worked for, the tour owners and the Colombian authorities rightly think he has an ulterior motive. Back in Saltmarsh, England, Dominic’s boss, Colleen Shepherd, has drafted DI Marvin Laraby to take over Dominic’s cases, beginning with the murder of Erin Dawes. With the help of evidence provided by Sgt. Maik and Constable Salter, Laraby arrests Robin Oakes, a wildlife photographer living in the gatehouse of his ruined estate. Oakes, a partner in a scheme set up by the murdered woman to provide land and capital for a drone company specializing in reforesting remote areas, is just the kind of person the class-conscious Laraby despises as a useless parasite. Laraby, a solid detective who has a troubled history with Dominic—whose brilliance is sometimes off-putting to his colleagues—soon worms his way into the good graces of everyone but Sgt. Maik. In Colombia, Dominic is joined by lifelong birding friend Juan “Traz” Perez, who pretends not to speak Spanish in hopes of learning something about Damian. Their tour is filled with the joy of seeing exotic birds and a near-death experience for Dominic, whose girlfriend in Saltmarsh, Lindy Hey, is nearly killed herself in what’s apparently an accidental gas explosion. Dominic returns when he’s done all he can for his brother only to find that Laraby, who released Oakes and arrested another man involved in the scheme, has gotten it wrong again, leaving Dominic to cleverly clean up the mess.
Skillfully written, full of moral ambiguities and artful puzzles, with a spine-tingling final sentence.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-233-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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 2024 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.
