Though Knopf (Cop Job, 2015, etc.) keeps the pot steadily simmering, this seventh case, middling for the series, is more...
Sam Acquillo tackles a cold case that arouses his warmest feelings: the murder of his father 40 years ago.
Not that Sam was André Acquillo’s biggest fan. “If you think I care what happened to my old man, you’re wrong,” he tells Orfio Pagliero, a mob scion who turned legit but never turned against his own father, Sicilian gangster Leon Pagliero. Orfio has been linked to André’s murder by a tip from true-crime writer Trevor Cleary, whose brother, Father Nelson Cleary, Sam’s sought out to learn more about a crucifix found at the bar where his father was killed. Sam insists to each of them in turn that he feels nothing but gratitude to the person who ended his father’s life, and an overlong but heartfelt series of flashbacks to his childhood and adolescence provides abundant evidence why he would’ve hated the father who treated him with such casual cruelty. Yet Sam not only allows himself to be talked into reopening this ice-cold case, but persuades Lt. Madelyn Wollencroft, a Bronx cold-case specialist, to join him in his joyless quest. Shaking the trees produces the usual fruit—somebody tails Sam, somebody tries to kill him, and everybody he meets pronounces his name without sounding out the L’s—but he persists. By the final revelation he’s not only bonded improbably with Wollencroft, but discovered so much more about his family than he ever cared to know that the identification of his father’s killer comes as a distinct anticlimax.
Though Knopf (Cop Job, 2015, etc.) keeps the pot steadily simmering, this seventh case, middling for the series, is more notable for its human relationships than its whodunit.Pub Date: May 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-429-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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