Five months after the Armistice, nursing sister Bess Crawford (A Forgotten Place, 2018, etc.) gets yet another painful reminder that for all too many, the Great War has never ended.
Plucked from her clinic in Wiltshire, Bess is volunteered by Matron Helena Minton for a very personal errand: to travel to Paris and ascertain why the Matron’s son, Lt. Lawrence Minton, hasn’t appeared for weeks at the peace talks to which he’s been assigned as a minor attaché. Is he still suffering the aftereffects of the wound he got last October? Has he become dependent on the drugs given him to fight the effects of his injury? Matron wants to find out quietly without pursuing the official inquiries that could end her son’s army career with the regiment of Bess’ father, Col. Richard Crawford. Arriving in France, Bess follows Lawrence’s trail to the village of St. Ives, where he’s living with schoolteacher Marina Lascelles, a family friend whose father’s life he once saved. Bess immediately sees the signs of his addiction to laudanum, a debilitating appetite that’s clearly incapacitated him for diplomatic service. She’s even more concerned when she realizes that the reason he started taking the drug was to escape his crippling sense of guilt over yet another of the wartime traumas in which Todd specializes. After many episodes of conflict, self-torment, and uncontrollable behavior, Dr. Michel Moreau, Bess’ nominal host in Paris while she secretly takes up residence in St. Ives, suggests the radical step of hypnotizing Lawrence to recover the searing memories he’s suppressed. Lawrence proves a ready subject, but several sessions only gradually reveal the story of “the angel” that’s been tormenting him, and even once he’s revealed the story, the truth behind it remains to be disclosed.
Sensitive, beautifully written, disconcertingly familiar in all but the circumstantial details of the underlying horror, and much too long.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285983-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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