It’s hard to imagine a more routine case. Only Jack’s sometimes-amusing, often rambling narration makes it worthwhile.
His third case pulls former Chicago cop Jack Starkey, mostly retired to Fort Myers, out of the Sunshine State back to his old stomping grounds and far beyond.
The people who knew old Henry Wilberforce back in Chicago didn’t think of him as a grocery-firm billionaire but as a generous, lovable oddball who shopped at supermarkets for strangers and still talked to his dog years after he’d died. But someone must have had it in for Henry, because he was murdered as he slept in his winter home in Naples. Naturally, Naples police chief Tom Sullivan reaches out to Jack (The Dollar-a-Year Detective, 2018, etc.) for help. Even though Henry’s left all his money to his charitable trust, the prime suspects are Nelson "Scooter" Lowry, his trust-fund nephew in Santa Monica; his socialite nieces, June Dumont and Libby Leverton; and their well-connected husbands, Washington attorney Alan Dumont and Boston developer Stewart Leverton. So after taking his affectionate leave of Fort Myers realtor Marisa Fernandez de Lopez and stopping off in the Windy City just long enough to eye the snow, refresh his appetite for the local sandwiches, and get the non-heirs’ addresses, Jack flies to LA, D.C., and Boston on the improbable grounds that he’ll learn something important from the looks in the relatives’ eyes when he tells them that the uncle they haven’t seen in years is not only dead, but murdered. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t. So he starts all over again, not by casting a wider net, but by making another round of trips to the relatives, who welcome him about as eagerly as you’d welcome most uninvited and unexpected guests. Jack finds their behavior so suspicious that he zeroes in on one of them, baits a trap with a young police officer hungry for promotion, and watches in satisfaction as the trap springs shut. Finis.
It’s hard to imagine a more routine case. Only Jack’s sometimes-amusing, often rambling narration makes it worthwhile.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-57962-588-7
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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