Vigorous but routine, with a particularly thin set of bogeymen behind the felonies. And isn’t it about time hard-bitten...
Apparently, underemployed Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl’s first seven cases (A Killer’s Kiss, 2007, etc.) have left him sufficiently starry-eyed to be capable of rude disillusionment when he runs into a bruising congressional campaign, and vice versa.
Congressman Peter DeMathis’ usual bagman, Colin Frost, has been picked up with too much heroin for his own personal use. Although Victor’s old classmate Melanie Brooks gets Victor to take the case, and the judge is persuaded to throw out the crucial evidence by a broad hint of blackmail, Frost’s gotten enough unwanted publicity to make him anathema to DeMathis. So Melanie invites Victor to take his place and deliver a $50,000 extortion payment to inoffensive Jessica Barnes. The fallout is immediate. Very soon after their meeting, Jessica is battered to death, and the police pluck Victor from the Governor’s Ball and send him shrieking into the headlines as well. On the other hand, there’s an upside: When Victor enters his office the next day, it’s full of potential clients who assume he has a long history as a bagman and want to hire him as their own personal fixer. Seeing no reason why he shouldn’t enjoy the silver lining along with the cloud, Victor allows veteran fixer Stony Mulroney, in the tale’s most amusing episode, to initiate him into the Fellowship of the Bag, a select circle of well-connected specialists who fix each other’s problems for an undisclosed markup. But there’s no way his job for the congressman or his fling with Ossana DeMathis, the congressman’s sister, are going to come to happy ends.
Vigorous but routine, with a particularly thin set of bogeymen behind the felonies. And isn’t it about time hard-bitten Victor, who improbably turns crusader toward the end of this installment, lost his last illusions about politics, ethics and the Philadelphia bar?Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-477-82283-8
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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