A tense, engaging series mystery.
The third installment of Ferrendelli’s mystery series (Revenge is Sweet, 2013, etc.) centers on a mortuary where the bodies aren’t exactly treated with respect.
For an unassuming Denver suburb, Grandview has seen its share of problems. Not long ago, there was an illegal drug ring operating from—of all places—the Grandview Police Department. Samantha Church, the Grandview Perspective newspaper reporter who exposed the operation, then became the victim of a revenge kidnapping that also threatened the lives of her boss, Wilson Cole Jr., and her daughter, April. Now, the local Hilltop Gardens Mortuary is secretly dismembering the recently deceased and selling body parts to the highest bidders. When the demand for parts gets too high, some Hilltop workers find deadly ways to restock their supply. Sam gets a tip about this suspicious activity from Abby Love, a bright pre-med student who drives dead bodies from hospitals and nursing homes to the appropriate places. Together, the two find out that things are far worse at Hilltop than they ever imagined. When Sam loses contact with Abby and goes to look for her, she finds out just how far the people at Hilltop are willing to go to keep things quiet. All the while, Sam must also deal with her unsteady dating life and continue her fight against alcoholism as she attempts to regain custody of her daughter. Ferrendelli’s skill at developing layered, flawed characters is once again evident here. Sam, in particular, is a likably imperfect protagonist. The author also proves that she has a keen eye for thoughtful details; for example, Wilson has a prosthetic hand to replace one he recently lost, and when he puts his hands on his hips, he has “the strange sensation of being able to feel the fabric of his pants with his right hand, but not with his left.” There are a few distracting errors, such as when Sam thinks about “this terrible addition to alcohol,” but most readers will gloss over them due to the story’s fine characters and suspense.
A tense, engaging series mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1507590003
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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