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A DEVIOUS DEATH

An unusual twist rooted in the recent horrors of World War I adds interest to a typical country-house mystery.

Money may be the root of all evil, but is it the motive for murder?

Julia and Phoebe Renshaw know they must make wealthy marriages to keep the estate of the Earl of Wroxley afloat. But duty is rubbing up against love, especially for Julia, the beautiful elder daughter enamored of a nobleman whose estate is near ruin. The daughters have been invited to visit their cousin Regina Brockhurst, who’s just purchased a home with the money she inherited from her father—much to the dismay of her mother, Lady Mandeville, her brother, Hastings, and his wife, Verna, who were left with little to support their pretensions. Phoebe’s trusted maid, Eva, and Julia’s sulky new maid, Miss Myra Stanley, are greeted by Regina’s dear friend Olive Asquith, whom they take for an upper-level servant. But it’s not so: Regina and Olive are making do with only a cook and her helper. Regina is mysterious about her plans for her new home, and when her unhappy relatives arrive with the family lawyer, they immediately accuse her of killing her father. The fog of enmity thickens when Regina is found dead in her bed, stabbed with the dowager’s hatpin. Phoebe and Eva, no strangers to crime-solving (A Pinch of Poison, 2016, etc.), know that the investigation will mostly be in the hands of Eva’s love, Constable Miles Brannock. Regina’s family would prefer to believe she was killed by Olive, an apparent outsider whose socialist tendencies belie her wealthy background. As they watch the family’s feeble gestures of mourning—Hastings floats around in what appears to be a whiskey-induced stupor, while his mother and wife shed no tears for Regina—the two sleuths devise a clever plan to catch the killer.

An unusual twist rooted in the recent horrors of World War I adds interest to a typical country-house mystery.

Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61773-838-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Kensington

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017

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BADLANDS

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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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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