A richly rendered story of murder on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Stander’s Michigan detective takes on a summertime double homicide in this crime novel, the 12th in a series.
During the Fourth of July weekend, the lake shores of Cedar County in northern Michigan fill with what the locals refer to as “summer people.” For Sheriff Ray Elkins, the holiday usually means firework injuries and a few DUIs. This year, however, he’s got a grisly double murder to contend with: a naked couple killed in flagrante delicto near the beach. The male victim, a man of around 30, has tattoos and a history of cocaine use. The female, a girl in her teens, bears evidence of a history of malnourishment and physical abuse. Authorities manage to identify the latter as Tammy Ogden, a troubled local girl well known to Child and Family Services, but the identity of the man remains mysterious. Which of the dead was the intended target of the murder, and why? Elkins and his team—including his live-in girlfriend Detective Sergeant Sue Lawrence—will have to wade into the less sightly corners of their resort area, where poverty, drug use, and gang activity are facts of life. Stander’s prose reveals a keen eye not just for crime scenes but for the landscape itself: “Ray looked left toward the Manitous as they motored north following the shoreline a quarter of a mile from the beach. The island’s upper topography was clearly outlined against the sky. The steep waves obscured the lower half, giving the illusion that they were floating above the water.” The author writes with great compassion for his characters, who feel as lived-in as the world they inhabit—they’re victims of long histories that have carried them, inevitably, to these crimes. Not as fast-paced or formulaic as many works in the genre, this thoughtful tale should please long-term fans of the series and new readers alike.
A richly rendered story of murder on the shores of Lake Michigan.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780997570175
Page Count: 260
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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