Great news for California lawyer Paul Madriani: His nemesis, Judge Armando (``the Coconut'') Acosta, has been charged first with solicitation and then with murder. Madriani's only problem is that, against all odds, the judge has become his client. It happens like this: Acosta's vendetta against Madriani's client Sgt. Tony Arguillo, alleged to have cooked the Police Association's books, collapses when Acosta is picked up for offering to pay reserve police deputy Brittany Hall for the kinds of favors Madriani has always assumed he enjoys. But the audiotape Hall made of their encounter turns up silent (some technical glitch) and then so does Hall herself, bludgeoned to death. Arguillo's cousin Lenore Goya—the prosecutor whose preparation of the solicitation case is ended when D.A. Coleman Klein, a political comer who doesn't like subordinates who stand up to him, cuts her loose—agrees to take on the Coconut's defense. But her attempt to join the solicitation charge with the homicide backfires when her status as Acosta's former prosecutor forces her to step aside, and Madriani's left holding the bag. The case against Acosta—no alibi, a highly improper appointment on Hall's calendar for the afternoon of the murder, forensic evidence that places her body inside his car, his broken eyeglasses left at Hall's place, except for a sliver lodged in her foot—lacks only an eyewitness. No, the only eyewitness, Hall's five-year-old daughter Kimberly, can place both Goya and Madriani himself on the scene. Meantime, the Police Association has been working overtime to discredit Madriani in order to burn the judge. The resulting legal/extralegal slugfest (marred only by Madriani's endless glosses on every action and every speech, as if he were a color commentator on a baseball broadcast) has something for everybody, even readers who think they can see every twist coming. Not as dense with surprises as Undue Influence (1994), but right up there with the rest of Martini's dependable output: a guaranteed rush for fans of courtroom drama. (Literary Guild main selection; Mystery Guild selection)
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14043-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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