Once again, Tantimedh ebulliently spins out a world in which pandemonium doesn’t reign; it pours.
Four more adventures, not so much linked as pureed, for Ravi Chandra Singh and his mates at London’s Golden Sentinels Private Investigations and Security Agency (Her Nightly Embrace, 2016).
Ravi sees gods. Shiva, Kali, Vishnu, Ganesha—they’re as close to him as members of his cheerfully dysfunctional family, even though his friends have to take his word for their presence. Sometimes their otherworldly counsel is wise and welcome; sometimes it’s a distraction from the logistical challenges of his job, which are considerable. Not so much perhaps in “The Hustle of the Gods,” a curtain raiser in which Golden Sentinels, hired by the shareholders of Advance Drone Defence Technologies to get the goods on their swindling founder, Tarquin Gaskell-Bridger, wrap up the case before you’ve settled properly into your favorite reading chair, but a lot more in “The True Price of London Properties,” which plops the gang into the middle of an inheritance slugfest between the vanished first wife and son of the late Russian oligarch Lev Sergeyevich Mayakovsky and the family of his aristocratic bride, Cecily Harkingdale—a slog whose length is almost justified by its disturbingly strong finish. The plot thickens further in “Black Bag LA,” in which Ravi and Julia, his colleague and lover, supposedly on a busman’s holiday to assess the effectiveness of the Golden Sentinels branch in La-La Land, tag along on a routine call to retrieve an antique pistol stolen from filmmaker Gossamer Rand Ross’ Hollywood palace during a party his assistant, Keith Doyle, threw in his absence and end up having kinky sex in Ross’ panic room while armed militants ransack the place for a cache of much more recent and powerful weapons—a mess so complicated that it requires an even more chaotic fourth story, “The Reluctant Despot,” to straighten it out, or at least explain how it got so messy. Back home, the machinations of family friend Mrs. Dhewan, the sharpie whose neighborhood food bank turns out to be just as problematic as the CIA, provides the closest thing to a common thread.
Once again, Tantimedh ebulliently spins out a world in which pandemonium doesn’t reign; it pours.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3060-1
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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