A solid if unsurprising thriller in need of some restraint.
Old Nazis never die—where would thrillers be without them?
When Skottie Foster, an African-American trooper in the Kansas Highway Patrol, flags down Dr. Travis Roan’s Jeep Wrangler, Grecian (Lost and Gone Forever, 2016, etc.) sets her on a dark and dangerous road. Roan is a Nazi hunter, affiliated with the Noah Roan Foundation, a West Coast version of the Wiesenthal Foundation. Accompanied by an enormous mastiff, Roan is in Kansas to confirm a report identifying Rudolph Bormann, who was once an assistant administrator in Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp—where he indulged his penchant for torture and improvised surgery. Roan initially attempts to deflect Skottie’s questions, but by the end of their conversation he has revealed an outline of his mission, and Skottie, fearing he may also intend retribution, alerts the sheriff of the county Roan is headed to. Skottie has problems of her own: She’s living with her mother and her daughter is acting up in school, but she can’t get Roan out of her mind. Eventually she trails after him, and the two become uneasy allies. Bormann has become Rudy Goodman, and his progress through the years is presented in flashback chapters. At first a rancher and family man, he is struck by lightning and, believing or pretending to believe he has powers, buys a derelict church and establishes a Nazi-like cult. By the beginning of the novel he is, at 94, a political and economic power in his corner of Kansas, and he defends his place vigorously. While Skottie is a believable and sympathetic character, both Roan and Bormann/Goodman are extreme examples of their types. Roan is calm, intellectual, unfailingly polite and correct, and seems at times omniscient, while Bormann is the very model of cruel sadism and belief in his own racial superiority, and despite his age, he manages to continue his grisly hobby. Grecian’s narrative also overindulges a bit in its presentation of the varieties of Nazi wickedness, as if every imaginable outrage needed to be included.
A solid if unsurprising thriller in need of some restraint.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-17611-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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