The secret is preposterous but serviceable, and the strenuously unnuanced story moves like greased lightning. Box has done...
The dark past from which Nate Romanowski’s hidden for so long and so successfully finally catches up with him and his friend, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Cold Wind, 2011, etc.).
“The Five. They’ve deployed,” Nate’s pal Large Merle tells him with his dying breath. As soon as he hears the news, Nate knows that his years of living off the grid in Wyoming’s Twelve Sleep County—no job, no bank account, no Social Security number—haven’t buried him deep enough. Setting his beloved falcon free and abandoning or destroying most of his meager belongings, he high-tails it out, pausing only to shoot three locals who draw on him first. Joe Pickett, tangling once more with Ten Sleep County Sheriff Kyle McLanahan over his responsibilities as government official, witness and friend of the fugitive Nate, is pulled so completely into the triple murder investigation that at one point Luke Brueggemann, his new trainee, asks him, “Does that mean we’re going to get to do real game warden stuff?” Nate, meanwhile, makes the rounds of all his closest friends and relations from his days in Special Forces and finds that those who haven’t recently died are in serious danger of getting killed before his eyes. Clearly John Nemecek, the master falconer from Special Forces who taught Nate everything he knows before sucking him into an improbable intrigue that led to a catastrophic screw-up for the federal government, is determined to keep his secret at all costs.
The secret is preposterous but serviceable, and the strenuously unnuanced story moves like greased lightning. Box has done much better work, but this high-casualty actioner is just fine.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15826-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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