Ghelfi's punchy noir prose holds his fourth Volk novel (The Verona Cable, 2009, etc.) together, and the plot is appealingly...
For brooding Russian agent Alexei Volkovoy, the murder of a beautiful journalist is personal.
On a bitter winter night in Moscow, "Volk" gets the news that he has long expected: Internationally acclaimed Russian journalist Katarina Mironova, aka Kato, has been shot dead in the street. Writer Ilya Jakobs, the elderly dissident who informs him, points out that Kato is the 22nd journalist murdered under Putin. It's unsettling to Volk that Ilya senses (or knows) the closeness of his relationship with Kato, which he thought he'd kept secret. Similarly, Volk's vulnerable lover Valya intuits his intimacy with the beautiful Kato and asks whether they'd had an affair. Volk lies as much to protect her as himself, but his close call doesn't prevent him from investigating her murder, which includes many flashbacks to their smoldering relationship and the work that ultimately cost her her life. Ironically, Volk's visit to the Kremlin and a meeting with an imperious figure he calls "The General" leads to his being officially given the assignment. Meanwhile, brutal American agent Grayson Stone, who heads an elite intelligence squad outside the strictures of the NSA or CIA, is methodically torturing Delveccio, a coarse crime boss he's convinced holds the key to murdered drug runners. When Volk learns the identity of the assassin, his discovery puts him squarely in the cross hairs of Stone's scorched-earth determination.
Ghelfi's punchy noir prose holds his fourth Volk novel (The Verona Cable, 2009, etc.) together, and the plot is appealingly twisty, albeit full of stock characters and developments.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59058-925-0
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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