Veteran Moody (Doubled in Spades, 1997, etc.) spins a puzzle that takes a back seat to her graceful evocation of her...
Twenty years after her 12th birthday ended in tragedy, Alice Beecham returns to her hometown in an attempt to make herself whole by figuring out what happened.
The summer of 1953 may have been uneventful for the world at large, but it was crucial for history teacher Fiona Beecham and her brood, who in the absence of their soldier husband and father have found a home with Fiona’s aunt in Shale, a town in coastal Kent. Even though nobody exactly liked 13-year-old Nicola Stone, nobody could resist her either. An arresting backstory—her father was doing time for strangling her friend Valerie Johnson two years earlier—combined with her sovereign impertinence and her budding sexuality to make her irresistible to the local lads, from Julian Tavistock to Alice’s all-but-twin Orlando, and those a bit older but no wiser, especially art teacher Bertram Yelland. As Alice struggles with unfamiliar and uncomfortable feelings for Sasha Elias, the piano teacher whose family was killed in the Holocaust, Nicola adroitly manages to affront every adult in Shale while remaining the alpha child in Alice’s circle. Her reign of terror ends when Orlando and Alice, picking blackberries the morning after Nicola’s rudeness spoiled Alice’s party the day before, find her beaten to death. When the passing years fail to bring resolution to the mystery of her death Alice resolves to mark the breakup of her marriage by resettling in Shale long enough to interview everyone concerned. She soon learns that despite their ritual reluctance, they’re more than willing to talk about the secrets they’ve hidden all these years.
Veteran Moody (Doubled in Spades, 1997, etc.) spins a puzzle that takes a back seat to her graceful evocation of her heroine’s childhood and its disintegration one fateful summer.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8014-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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