Contrasting plotlines come together to form a worthy thriller.
In this latest installment of Birdy’s (The Girl in White Pajamas, 2013) mystery series, someone guns down an employee of R&B Investigations and tries to hack its computer system.
When private investigator Rose Jones hears that her hired hacker, Tommie, was shot outside her building in Boston, she calls her business partner, Bogie McGruder. They suspect the attack was personal and seek assistance from Rose’s uncle, “hacker king” Walter Beck. It seems that a cybercriminal with a secret agenda is targeting Bogie and Walter and also attempting to infiltrate R&B Investigations’ computer system. Meanwhile, back in Florida, two local cops are threatening to stir up trouble for Bogie’s 20-year-old daughter, Amanda, and her cop husband, Randy, by trying to goad them into a pornographic-movie scheme. The titular character is Bogie’s smart 4-year-old daughter, Isabella; her “pajamas” are a martial arts uniform—her garb of choice. Although she’s merely a secondary character, she steals every scene she’s in; for example, she watches Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies obsessively and easily spots suspicious cars before Bogie and Rose’s dad, Darryl, do. There’s really no main protagonist; various people feature prominently at different points, and the two main storylines are connected by their characters, not by their plots. Both stories are equally engaging, however: The Boston plot is full of suspense as the villains’ ultimate goal is gradually revealed, while the Florida story is a soap opera of porn, drugs and false accusations. Their differences are highlighted when, at one point, Bogie visits Amanda in Florida and lectures her on excessive spending before heading to Boston to face a would-be assassin. Some of the novel’s technological aspects, however, are a bit underexplained; for example, Rose doesn’t want cops checking on Tommie, but it’s unclear why she’s worried about his modems (or why he owns three of them).
Contrasting plotlines come together to form a worthy thriller.Pub Date: July 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500335397
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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