DARK STREETS, COLD SUBURBS

Name: DARK STREETS, COLD SUBURBS
Author: Aimee Hix
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5470-3

by Aimee Hix ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2019

Hix seems lost in uncharted territory as she forges her way into hard-boiled emo. What doesn’t kill you seems to leave you...

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Ex-cop Willa Pennington (What Doesn’t Kill You, 2018) continues her quest to earn her private investigator’s license.

Angry that her dad has sent her on a phony stakeout to teach her the ropes, Willa lashes out at everyone in sight, including her beau, Seth Anderson, who promptly disappears on a secret mission for the government. At the mixed martial arts class she takes to relax, she meets Aja, a high schooler who’s being stalked by an ex-boyfriend. While helping her, Willa also gets a call from Jan Boyd, a cop friend who asks her to reinvestigate a cold case: the death of Amanda Veitch, who died 17 years ago from blunt force trauma. Although the two cases ought to keep Willa pretty busy, her true vocation is reliving past traumas: her abandonment as a child by her mother; the death of her best friend; and her recent brush with death in a fire set by a neo-Nazi maniac. Nightmares, cold sweats, and endless rehashings of the past compete with heroic action sequences. Willa wonders why today is “Make Willa Deal with Uncomfortable Emotions Day.” Readers will wonder why practically every day is Make Willa Deal with Uncomfortable Emotions Day.

Hix seems lost in uncharted territory as she forges her way into hard-boiled emo. What doesn’t kill you seems to leave you angry, volatile, and slightly unhinged.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5470-3

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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REMEMBER WHEN

by Nora Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2003

A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...

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Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.

Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.

A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.