Daugherty (Night School, 2013, etc.) uses her experience as a crime reporter to create a pulse-pounding combination of...
Her mother’s murder has forever altered a woman’s life.
Harper McClain discovered her mother’s nude and bloody body when she was 12. Because her father was a suspect who left her with her grandmother and eventually moved away and remarried, their relationship remains fragile at best. Harper’s anchor during those difficult times was Robert Smith, now the head of Savannah’s homicide squad. Although he never kept his promise to find the elusive killer, he’s always treated Harper like family, and her good working relationship with the police has enhanced her career as the crack crime reporter for the Daily News. Fearless and driven, she and her photographer, Miles Jackson, never give up on a story even when it puts them in danger. Now she faces a case that could turn her life to ashes and destroy her forbidden relationship with undercover cop Luke Walker. When Harper and Miles arrive on the scene of a murder, she learns that the body of Marie Whitney was first discovered by her 12-year-old daughter. When she sneaks a look at the crime scene, it’s exactly like that of her mother. From that moment, she becomes obsessed with the case. Is the culprit the same person who killed her mother—someone so well-versed in police work that he leaves no clue, no DNA, no trace evidence, even taking away the victim’s clothes? Unlike Harper’s artist mother, Marie was a highflying fundraiser for a local college who was disliked by her co-workers and had a long string of lovers—one of whom Harper suspects may be one of the detectives working the case. Although Luke rebukes her for her obsession and denies that a cop could be the killer, Harper risks her job, her lover, and even her life when she won’t back down.
Daugherty (Night School, 2013, etc.) uses her experience as a crime reporter to create a pulse-pounding combination of mystery and suspense that hints at a welcome follow-up.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14884-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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