The hero works so hard at being tough, and the author works so hard at giving him chances to be tough, that the resulting...
Hard-used former swimmer Duck Darley (Under Water, 2017) gets pulled into a no-win case that shows that dry land is no safer for him than H2O.
His live-in gig providing swimming lessons to 8-year-old Stevie Cohen and orgasms to his mother, retired fashion editor Juliette Cohen, abruptly ended by an urgent text message imploring him to call his sometime partner, Cassandra Kimball, aka Mistress Justine, Duck travels upstate to see Cass and finds her inconsolable at the death of her lover, faded writer Victor Wingate, whose body has been found over the falls of a mountain in the Northern Catskills. Six years ago, Victor had attempted suicide, and the local cops think he was just more successful this time. But Cass insists that Victor couldn’t have killed himself: His new book, The Athlete, promised to be such a barn-burning exposé of the travails of an East German javelin thrower and his experiences as part of that country's Olympic doping program that it had inspired Victor with a fiery new sense of purpose. At the same time, it’s clear that Victor’s research into BioVida’s Dr. Eberhard Lipke, who’s been doping athletes into success for 50 years, and his equally unscrupulous American partner, Dr. James Crowley, has ruffled some serious feathers. Even before Duck meets with Cass, he’s threatened by Oliver, a tattooed henchman whose targets soon expand to include Juliette and Stevie. When Victor’s death is followed by another, that of a former athlete named Carl Kruger, Cass herself becomes suspected of double murder by the authorities. Meanwhile, Duck’s prodigious appetites for drugs, booze, and sex will lead him to the beds of three women, one of whom will whip him with his full consent in a high-concept dungeon, then decline next day to give him an alibi, before the mystery peters out in a shower of disappointing revelations and nonrevelations.
The hero works so hard at being tough, and the author works so hard at giving him chances to be tough, that the resulting narrative, laconic and sensitive to a fault, reads like a pastiche of men’s-magazine fiction. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0971-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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