The beautiful landscape of coastal Maine adds local color to two intriguing mysteries.
A tiny Maine island provides the setting for a modern-day murder and a puzzle from the past.
Julia Snowden’s family runs a clambake business whose profits rely on the tourist trade. The season is almost over when handsome lobsterman Jason Caraway causes bad feelings by flirting madly with single mom Emmy Bailey, one of the servers, much to the chagrin of Pru Caraway, Jason’s ex-wife, who also works at the Snowden Family Clambake Company. Also involved in this combustible brew is Terry Durand, the elder brother of Julia’s boyfriend, Chris, who’s recently been released from prison. Meanwhile, Julia is deeply immersed in the renovation of Windsholme, her family's abandoned mansion, which hasn’t been used since 1929. The contractor is starting demolition on the third floor so that elderly family member Marguerite Morrow can make one last visit before the house is irrevocably changed forever. Julia notices that Jason seems to know one of the Russian immigrants on the demolition crew. The tour discloses a walled-off room still containing furniture, clothes, and a journal dating back to the late 1800s. Then Jason and Terry get into a fistfight that makes Terry the police’s top suspect when Julia finds Jason with his head bashed in—though they’re also interested in the missing Dmitri, whose excellent English made him the natural spokesperson for the Russians. Jason was hiding many secrets, some of which will prove dangerous for Julia as she continues her sleuthing in the past and present. Even though Julia has previous experience with murder (Steamed Open, 2018, etc.), the police are ambivalent about accommodating her attempts to prove Terry innocent. Her whole family, meantime, is fascinated by the mystery of who lived in the walled-off room and hopes the journal will provide the answers.
The beautiful landscape of coastal Maine adds local color to two intriguing mysteries.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1795-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.
Crime-fighting Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett outdoes himself during a temporary transfer from sleepy Saddlestring to fashionable Jackson Hole.
Will Jensen, the Jackson game warden, was a great guy and a model warden, but once his wife left him six months ago, he spiraled into madness and suicide, and now Joe’s been called to replace him. The transition is anything but smooth. There’s no question of Joe’s family coming with him, so he’s reduced to hoping he can get a signal for the cell-phone calls he squeezes into his busy schedule. En route to his new posting, Joe has to pursue a marauding grizzly. He arrives to meet a formidable series of challenges. Cantankerous outfitter Smoke Van Horn wants to go on attracting elk with illegal salt licks without the new warden’s interference. Animal Liberation Network activist Pi Stevenson wants him to publicize her cause and adopt a vegan diet. Developer Don Ennis wants to open a housing development for millionaires who like their meat free of additives. Ennis’s trophy wife Stella simply wants Joe—and he wants her back. As he wrestles with these demands, and with a supervisor riled over Joe’s track record of destroying government property in pursuit of bad guys (Trophy Hunt, 2004, etc.), Joe slowly becomes convinced that Will did not kill himself.
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15291-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.
In Hoag’s (Cold, Cold Heart, 2015, etc.) latest, Minneapolis homicide detective Sam Kovac has been separated from his longtime partner, the diminutive yet hard-charging Nikki Liska.
Nikki wanted more time with her teenage sons, so she sought assignment to the department’s new cold case unit, where she's intrigued by the decades-old unsolved murder of Ted Duffy, a sex crimes detective, despite push back from a retired detective close to his family. Sam’s first case without Nikki is the double murder—"raw animal violence"—of Lucien Chamberlain, an Asian studies professor, and his wife, Sondra, who were slashed to death with the professor’s own antique samurai weapons. Chamberlain was an egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac. Even his adult children hated him. Son Charles is damned by OCD and his father’s unachievable expectations. Daughter Diana is bipolar and hypersexual. Nikki's and Sam’s cases become parallel stories of anger, isolation, ambition, violence, revenge, and perversion. With Duffy’s widow married to his prosperous twin brother and reluctant to cooperate, Nikki has no lead until she discovers Evi, Duffy’s long-ago foster child. Sam has too many suspects, including an ex-con working for a handyman service, Charles and Diana, and professor Ken Sato, Diana’s lover and Lucien’s rival for department chair. Hoag adds depth to the tale with secondary characters like the preening Sato; fragile librarian Jennifer Duffy, broken and isolated by her father’s murder; and the new homicide lieutenant, Joan Mascherino, who's tough-minded and empathetic, with knife-keen intelligence hidden under a prim personality intolerant of swearing. With an ear for sardonic cop dialogue and humor—Sondra Chamberlain regularly ended her day with a "bottle of Chateau Blackout"—Hoag livens up these two already fast-paced, ripped-from-the-headlines mysteries with interesting factoids about such things as the history of female samurai.
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95455-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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