Finally, a professional-grade detection-cum-actioner with a hero who actually has a logical reason for being so emotionally...
The versatile Knopf (Tango Down, 2017, etc.) kicks off a new series starring a reluctant investigator who’s “like the Terminator with an advanced degree.”
Not many people recover from childhood autism, but Waters did, more or less. He’s so good at reading other poker players’ tells that he’s been banned from the casinos, and fellow player Paresh Rajput naturally hired him as an organizational psychologist for his firm, ExciteAble Technologies. But he still won’t tell anyone his first name, he looks everyone he meets unflinchingly in the eye, and he’s taken a married lover, Olivia Lefèvre, who doesn’t love him any more than he loves her. Waters’ orderly life ends when he comes home from the gym to find Paresh’s severed head sitting on the floor of his guest room (the rest of his body will soon turn up in Waters’ storage locker). Megan Rajput and Waters’ co-workers at ExciteAble all seem above suspicion, but that doesn’t matter anyway because DS Noah Shapiro, of the New Haven Police Department, is sure that Waters is his killer. As the evidence against him mounts, so does the danger. The real murderer alternately taunts and threatens Waters over the telephone, arranges for suspiciously large cash transfers from Paresh’s bank account to his own, plants firecrackers in the hotel room the crime-scene crew has obliged him to hole up in, sends a burly thug to beat him up, and finally resorts to settling their dispute the good old American way, by shooting at him. Through it all, Waters remains, if not exactly ebullient, then certainly dispassionate as he returns the threats, dodges the firecrackers and bullets, and, fortified by years of wrestling and bodybuilding, turns the tables on the thug en route to exposing a nefarious, if not exactly unexpected, scheme against ExciteAble Technologies.
Finally, a professional-grade detection-cum-actioner with a hero who actually has a logical reason for being so emotionally disengaged. More, please.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-57962-566-5
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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