The vicar of Thornford Regis finds his parish riddled with gossip and crimes, past and present.
The Reverend Tom Christmas and his daughter, Miranda, settled in Thornford Regis after the murder of his wife devastated his family. Although he doesn’t care for bagpipes and loathes haggis, Tom finds himself attending the annual Burns supper at a local hotel currently closed for renovation. The owner, Australian Will Moir, seems a bit distracted. Tom has no chance to learn why, for Will’s body is shortly found in the tower at Thorn Court Country Hotel during a massive snowstorm. Police investigators learn that he was poisoned with yew seeds. When Judith Ingley, a retired nurse who years before lived at Thorn Court, shows up at the closed hotel, Tom takes her in. Many villagers think vicarage housekeeper Madrun Prowse, who provided the yew berry tarts for the dinner, simply made a deadly mistake. The police, however, have plenty of suspects who may have wanted Will dead. A family who lost their son to suicide after Will verbally attacked him is the most likely. But as Tom begins to learn some long-hidden secrets, he realizes that the killer is far from obvious. A second murder redoubles his efforts to find the truth.
Tom’s second (Twelve Drummers Drumming, 2011) is a must-read for lovers of classic English mysteries, chock-full of suspects, red herrings and details of village life.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34446-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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The latest in an award-winning series set in the Bighorn Mountains (Savage Run, 2002, etc.).
Minutes after Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett arrests Lamar Gardiner, District Supervisor for the Twelve Sleep National Forest, for firing into a herd of elk, killing seven animals and blindly continuing to reload with cigarettes after he runs out of shells, Gardiner manages to handcuff Joe to his steering wheel and bolt off into a winter storm, only to turn up pinned to a tree with a pair of arrows, his throat cut. And things get even messier from that point on. The attack on a federal agent, together with reports that the Nation of the Rocky Mountain Sovereign Citizens has established an encampment in Twelve Sleep, brings gung-ho US Forest Service investigator Melinda Strickland and FBI sharpshooter Dick Munker, a veteran of Waco and Ruby Ridge, to town. Strickland maintains that she’s just trying to get justice for a murdered official, but she seems awfully eager to tie the perp to the Sovereigns. By the time Joe arrests one of Gardiner’s disappointing killers and identifies the other, Strickland and Munker are already planning an all-out attack on the encampment. The prospect is a personal nightmare for Joe, since Jeannie Keeley, the drifter whose abandoned daughter April Joe and his wife have been trying to adopt, has reclaimed April and spirited her off to the dubious shelter of the Sovereigns.
The loose ends that make this the least satisfactory of Joe’s three cases to date still don’t inhibit Box’s gift for nonstop action and his ability to see every side of the most divisive issues in the West.Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15045-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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