As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell...
Goldberg rises above the sleazy glamour of his well-received debut (Fake Liar Cheat, 2000) and takes a far deeper cut into his material.
In Los Angeles, anthropologist Paul Luden gets a call from Bruce Duper, his neighbor on Granite Lake in upcoast Washington. Paul’s separated wife Molly has disappeared from their lonesome cabin. Their boat is docked, the cabin’s front door locked. Where’s Molly? Now in his mid-30s, Paul drives up with his new love, Ginny, 19, his navel-ringed student, whose insecure, demanding dialogue Goldberg captures dead-on. We hear about Paul’s parents and his pathetic losses with Molly. Paul and Molly, it seems, should never have married, both being manic-depressive (details about their illness are doled out slowly), but at least Molly’s body knows more than they do: it aborts one fetus, has another rupture her fallopian tube, and finally creates a monster with the one child she does bear, Katrina, a beautiful little dying girl with brain and body tumors which in themselves harbor. . . . Since childhood, Paul’s illness has had him drawing inner organs and bones of pigs and other animals—now he’s a bone-smart anthropologist. A large part of the story’s charms are Paul’s very, very big thoughts about the descent of man from a single cell—the mind of an anthropologist viewing his family’s wink of existence. When Katrina dies, Paul madly draws her inner organs, tumors (and what’s inside them), while under the delusion that he can plant her cells in the earth or lake and have them regrow. But now where’s Molly gone? His dead smolder inside him, flare up and sear—and is Molly or Katrina the title character?
As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell Crowe, and our ties with him weaken the more we learn. Still, strong stuff as the world wavers.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-284-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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