Alexander brings back her husband-and-wife detective team (Death in the Floating City, 2012, etc.) in a tale most likely to...
Nothing lowers the atmosphere of a country estate more than a corpse on the library floor. Fortunately, no one can solve the murder more graciously and expeditiously than Lady Emily Hargreaves in this frothy Victorian whodunit.
When Archibald Scolfield, the Marquess of Montagu, staggers into the Hargreaves’ ancestral home and falls dead on the Axminster carpet, Lady Emily is reluctant to consider the most obvious suspect: his cousin and her neighbor, Matilda. Archibald’s death means that Matilda will become a marchioness in her own right—until a long-lost heir conveniently arrives to claim the title. In the course of their decorous probing, Lady Emily and her husband, Colin, discover that Archie was not quite as noble as his lineage would suggest, and the list of suspects grows accordingly. A subplot about illegitimacy and downstairs intrigues involving the housemaid, Lily; a vindictive kitchen maid; and Simon, Earl Flyte, further confounds the Hargreaves, who have to contend with a gaggle of suspects until they realize where they should have been looking all along. The cigar-smoking, Homer-quoting Lady Emily, who’s meant to be a liberal-minded renegade in a Worth gown, is jarringly misplaced in her century, and it’s especially disappointing that she uses her wealth and influence to steer events toward not one but two improbable outcomes.
Alexander brings back her husband-and-wife detective team (Death in the Floating City, 2012, etc.) in a tale most likely to appeal to readers who like a little naughty homicide blended into their cozy period romance.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02470-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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