Mid-grade thrills from a pro’s pro.
A private eye’s wife and former partner goes back on the job to find out who made her a widow.
The shock Emily Kramer feels when her husband is shot down on a strange street deepens when she learns that he’s cleaned out his retirement account, their savings account, even the household account, and that Kramer Investigations is broke as well. Clearly Phil Kramer was hiding something big from her. Phil has been a man of many secrets, any of which could have gotten him killed. Nor is Emily the only one who’s looking for them, as she realizes when a masked man takes her prisoner, interrogates her about Phil’s work and threatens to kill her if she doesn’t share the information he insists she must have about his last case. Jerry Hobart, the hit man who killed her husband, has accepted a new contract to kill Emily. But he’s decided that instead of collecting $200,000 from millionaire Theodore Forrest for a simple job, he’d rather uncover the secret that made Phil’s life so dangerous that Ted Forrest couldn’t afford to leave him alive. The pattern soon resolves itself into one of Perry’s patented triangular competitions. Emily races to track down her husband’s biggest secret before the masked man can find it. Jerry, discounting her claims that she knows nothing, keeps her in his sights while he hunts the information that will make her dispensable. And Forrest takes strong measures to make sure that the unsavory details of the case Phil worked for him nine years ago never see the light of day. The characters aren’t among Perry’s most memorable, and the suspense is moderate by his high standards. But the back stories the tale requires are integrated into the action a lot more smoothly than they were in Silence (2007).
Mid-grade thrills from a pro’s pro.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101292-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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