Archer (Five, 2014) and Strobel’s debut as a team keeps building suspense until you’re frantically counting the pages until...
An extreme case of he says/she says drives this psychological thriller.
Imagine you’re Joanna Berrigan, drying your hair one evening at home, when a total stranger lets himself into your house with a key and insists he’s your fiance. He won’t leave even when you throw a paperweight at him, and you spend a night locked in the pantry to protect yourself. Then imagine you’re Erik Thieben, coming home from a tiring day at a company near Munich and discovering that the woman you love denies all knowledge of you. But for Joanna and Erik, it’s not imagination. Joanna can remember her best friend, whom she met through Erik, and she can remember her former fiance, whom her overbearing father, the third-richest man in Australia, picked out for her to marry. But she doesn’t remember anything about how she met Erik, let alone how they fell in love. After a few attempts to escape from Erik, Joanna agrees to see a neurologist, who suggests the cause might be systematic amnesia: Joanna could be protecting herself from a trauma too terrible to recall. But was Erik the cause of the trauma? If so, why does she feel compelled to harm herself instead? And why does the name Ben keep coming up in her faulty memory? Erik wonders why Joanna keeps drawing close to him even though she claims to be frightened of him and has erased every trace of him from her memory and their house. Through alternating narratives, each of the lovers weighs every word of the other, just as the reader, like Joanna and Erik, must scrutinize every clue about who’s telling the truth and is pulled along with them into an ever expanding nightmare.
Archer (Five, 2014) and Strobel’s debut as a team keeps building suspense until you’re frantically counting the pages until the end, because you know that only when you reach it will you get the answers you crave as much as the bewildered leads do.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11306-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
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