A biographer inherits an interesting challenge that may have led to murder.
Though she’s best known as a biographer, Rona Parish also writes human interest stories for the local magazine, Chiltern Life, and she wants to make the magazine's cookery specialist, Nicole Summers, the final entry in a series on successful single mothers. During their first interview, she finds Nicole very organized and rather cold; on arriving for their second interview, she finds her dead. Rona’s artist husband, Max, and her twin sister, Lindsey, a lawyer with a string of broken romances, aren’t surprised, since Rona’s already walked into way too many murder cases (A Question of Identity, 2012, etc.). Meanwhile, Rona’s agreed to write the biography of TV presenter Gideon Ward, whose hard-charging interviews made him famous. Established biographer Russell Page was well into the project when he was killed in a car crash, and his publisher’s asked Rona to complete the job. As she sorts through the masses of papers, DVDs, and memory sticks provided by Page’s widow, she comes upon some connections that give her pause. Separate from the other material is a tape of an apparently innocuous interview with Australian Bruce Sedgwick, who inherited a chain of hotels from an uncle with the proviso that he live in England. Bruce is the employer of Patrick Summers, Nicole’s ex-husband and the prime suspect in her murder. After talking to more people who knew Page, Rona realizes that he had a more than ordinary interest in Sedgwick and wonders whether his car accident was really an accident. As she deals with her sister’s new romance, her best friend’s pregnancy, and her parents’ divorce and remarriages, Rona becomes ever more fascinated with the potentially dangerous connections between Sedgwick and other people in her life.
Fraser showcases a delightful heroine whose own life, along with the lives of her friends and family, is consistently more interesting than the circuitous murder cases she is asked to solve.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8670-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
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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
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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
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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