Plenty of suspects keep the story moving, but the heroine would be hard to pick out of a lineup of cozy sleuths.
An amateur detective must solve a murder to clear her father.
Krissy Hancock, who owns the bookstore/cafe Death by Coffee in the smallish town of Pine Hills, has a reputation as a crime solver (Death by Pumpkin Spice, 2016, etc.). She's surprised and delighted by the unannounced visit of her father, mystery author James Hancock, his agent, Rick Wiseman, and Rick’s put-upon assistant, Cameron Little. Pushed into giving a talk for the local book club, James finds that almost every member has a manuscript they want him to read. James foists this task off on Rick, who ungraciously dashes off before the crowd can ply him with their work—but not before he makes an obnoxious pass at Krissy, who’s never liked him. Next morning, Rick is nowhere to be found, so Krissy goes to his hotel, where she discovers his body, stabbed through the eye with a pen. Her old flame Officer Paul Dalton is unhappy to find Krissy involved in yet another crime. His unhappiness deepens when Krissy's father reveals that he went to Rick’s hotel, fired him, and punched him in the nose for good measure, as if intent on making himself a suspect. As it turns out, the wannabe authors had all visited the hotel, leaving their manuscripts in the hope that Rick would read them. As she balances her love life between the doctor she’s dating and Paul Dalton, whom she still has feelings for, Krissy can’t help poking around even though she’s warned off by the police. Encouraged by her friends and father, who’s curious to investigate a real-life case, she resolves to identify the killer.
Plenty of suspects keep the story moving, but the heroine would be hard to pick out of a lineup of cozy sleuths.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0885-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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