Another sleuthing triumph for San Francisco’s elderly Sister Mary Helen of Mount Saint Francis College and her Irish best friend Sister Eileen (Death of An Angel, 1997, etc.). The murder victim this time is Monsignor Joseph Higgins, pastor of St. Agatha’s—a suavely elegant man with a taste for the finer things, now found dead of poison after a meeting of the parish council. Sisters Mary Helen and Eileen, delivering a loaf of homemade Irish soda bread to the rectory in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, were invited by the Monsignor to join the council meeting for tea and were appalled by the tension- charged atmosphere at the table as tea and the hacked-up soda bread were handed round by surly housekeeper Eveleen Glynn. The other participants—retired professor Nicholas Komsky; alcoholic George Jenkin; bejeweled Tina Rodiman; weepy Debbie Stevens; recent widower and council treasurer Fred Davis, and parish administrator Sister Noreen—all make clear their scorn and hatred for the Monsignor, who was accused at the time of his death of using church funds for his own self-indulgence. Getting to the bottom of things takes a couple of replays of the meeting, orchestrated by Inspector Dennis Gallagher with partner Kate Murphy and accompanied by his usual bitter complaints about Sister Mary Helen’s attempts to help. But help she does—eventually arriving at the crucial clue to the killer. Clumsily plotted and largely unsuspenseful but enlivened by its series of incisive character studies—and sure to please the Sister’s legion of fans. . . . L¢pez-Ortega, Antonio MOONLIT: Stories Trans. by Nathan Budoff Lumen/Brookline (224 pp.) $15.95 paperback original Aug. 1, 1998 ISBN: 1-57129-057-5 A mosaic portrait of contemporary Venezuela emerges with seductive intensity, if only imperfect clarity from this first collection of 61 variously related vignettes and meditations, many scarcely a page in length. The long first section, entitled “Moonlit,” gathers “stories” that seemingly re-imagine in different forms an unnamed family’s experiences (particularly vacations and miscellaneous excursions) and traumas (the abduction, perhaps death, of a wife; the dangers to which young siblings are exposed; a failed artist’s suicidal fantasies). The briefer “Futures and Other Times” assembles more general images of annihilation and apocalypse; and a concluding section (“Extremes”) juxtaposes the family’s stories against such real events as the horrendous murder of a three-year-old by two Liverpool preadolescents. One admires Ortega’s concision and mastery of tone, but the opacity and redundancy also prominent in these accomplished miniatures discourages us from fully entering their dark, disintegrating world.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19256-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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