In the past, Rucka has done extremely well with edgy heroines (Critical Space, 2001, etc.), but his self-absorbed,...
Off-key thriller about the agonies of a boozy rock star who’s crocked around the clock.
Abruptly exiled from her band’s European tour, Mim Bracca arrives home in Portland, Oregon, one very unhappy guitarist. Mim is beautiful and brilliant—she can make guitar strings smoke, her manager insists—and her fellow musicians appreciate her talent, but the fact is she’s a fall-down drunk who’s reached the point of diminishing returns. The band can’t any longer put up with her benders. Ironically, then, as Tailhook’s music climbs the charts, converting Mim into an icon, rich and famous, her life force sags and now is about to bottom. Having paid off the cabbie, she’s reaching into her purse for keys to the house she hasn’t seen for four months, when a man springs out of the darkness and levels a gun at her—prelude to rape or murder, she feels certain. Neither happens—for reasons she comes to understand only later. Actually, it’s her drug-dealing brother who gets himself murdered, and her ex-convict father, Mim thinks (for a while), did the killing. In the meantime, humiliating pictures of her (naked, grossly provocative) have surfaced on the Internet: pictures she swears at first, to her lawyer, she never posed for, subsequently acknowledging that “Sometimes I black out.” Enigmatic figures from her troubled past reenter Mim’s life, bringing with them threats of kidnapping, blackmail, belated retribution. And then there’s Portland police detective Tracy Hoffman, so tough and smart, so very attractive, bringing with her . . . complications. With so many of those cluttering up her life, where can poor, beset Mim look for help? Often as not, in a bottle.
In the past, Rucka has done extremely well with edgy heroines (Critical Space, 2001, etc.), but his self-absorbed, self-loathing rock goddess is just not likable—and name the novel that can survive that.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80135-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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