The wrenching ordeal of a Black Sheep as a murder suspect makes this entry the strongest in Canadeo’s series.
Members of the Black Sheep knitting group (Knit to Kill, 2017, etc.) must use their sleuthing talents to rescue one of their own.
Real estate agent Suzanne Cavanaugh arrives at a Black Sheep get-together in a towering rage. Once again, her fellow realtor Liza Devereaux pulled a dirty trick to get half the commission on a house that Suzanne sold, and they almost came to blows at a business meeting. Her friends calm Suzanne down, and when she sees Liza’s car at the office on her way home, she decides to stop in and apologize only to find Liza’s dead body. The police quickly hear of the ongoing disagreements, which make Suzanne their prime suspect. One of the investigating detectives is Charles Mossbacher, who’s in a relationship with Maggie, owner of the Black Sheep knit shop. As the evidence piles up against Suzanne, Maggie loyally defends her friend, though it hurts her relationship with Charles. It becomes obvious to the Black Sheep group that someone has framed Suzanne when they learn that Liza died from an allergic reaction to the Botox in her diet drink, a drink both Liza and Suzanne kept in the office refrigerator. The skillful advocacy of her lawyer, Helen Forbes, keeps her out of jail, but Suzanne and her friends know they must find the killer if the police refuse to look elsewhere. Although Liza had a nasty divorce, it seems more likely that someone in her office had the best opportunity to murder Liza. But who? A lot of digging turns up some strange family dynamics and a much nicer side of Liza than they ever imagined, even if it wasn’t nice enough to prevent someone from killing her.
The wrenching ordeal of a Black Sheep as a murder suspect makes this entry the strongest in Canadeo’s series.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0863-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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