The appealing hero’s accountant frets that his habit of taking pro bono cases is unsustainable. A more pointed complaint...
Dundee, Oregon, attorney Cal Claxton’s latest maybe-paying client is a neighbor and friend whose wine-growing operation may have proved irresistible to a killer.
Jim Kavanaugh made the call himself after finding the body of his estranged wife, Lori, at the Parrett Mountain overlook where she’d arranged to meet him. But that doesn’t impress detectives Hal Ballard and Sonia Rodriquez of the Yamhill County Sheriff’s Department, who think he’s just trying to brazen out his own murder of the woman who’d taken two husbands before him and may have been on the lookout for No. 4. A wide-open-spaces type who blanches at the prospect of prison, Jim begs his neighborhood lawyer for help, and Cal, who never seems to walk away from a high-stakes, low-income case (Not Dead Enough, 2016, etc.), goes to bat for him. His shrewd observations quickly get Jim out of jail, though not out of the glare of the cops and prosecutor Helen Berkowitz. When undocumented immigrant Luis Delgado is murdered soon after, Cal is convinced the two cases are connected, but he seems to be the only one, even after the disappearance of Isabel Rufino, Luis’ girlfriend. A honey trap set for Sean McKnight, a pastor who owns another farm nearby, makes Cal wonder whether someone aims to unite all the properties best suited to raising pinot noir grapes under the same criminal banner. Fighting fire with fire, he talks Jim’s sales manager, Candice Roberts, into spying on rival vintner Blake Daniels, who’s already eager to get her under the covers.
The appealing hero’s accountant frets that his habit of taking pro bono cases is unsustainable. A more pointed complaint might be that in his hands, the simplest-seeming cases end up involving everyone in Yamhill County and even some folks who are just passing through.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0838-6
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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