Box handles both the set pieces and the longer arc with professional dexterity. The results can’t exactly be called...
Box takes another break from the travails of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Vicious Circle, 2017, etc.) to throw a serial killer at a dogged investigator and vice versa.
His real name is Ronald Pergram, but he’s more widely known as the Lizard King because of his habit of abducting lot lizards—prostitutes who work truckers’ parking lots—and driving off with them into the endless sunset. And Cassandra Dewell, chief investigator for the Bakken County Sheriff’s Department, has been after him for more than three years, ever since veteran Sheriff Jon Kirkbride recruited her from Montana and began to train her as his successor. Now that the deep-laid trap Cassie’s set for the Lizard seems to be about to snap shut, she’s arranged for every available lawman to be on hand when the Lizard’s truck, complete with his latest victim, or at least with forensic evidence he hasn’t yet had time to clean off, crosses North Dakota and heads west into Bakken County. On the very same day Cassie’s set her trap, her son’s friend Kyle Westergaard and his buddy Raheem Johnson, both 14, plan to pull a Huck and Jim and light out for the wide open spaces on a boat they hope to row to New Orleans. All too predictably, Cassie’s trap goes horribly wrong, leaving her frozen out of the department by slimy new Bakken County attorney Avery Tibbs and the Lizard with several new hostages on his hands, setting the stage for a dogged pursuit all the way to Yellowstone National Park.
Box handles both the set pieces and the longer arc with professional dexterity. The results can’t exactly be called memorable, but if you like chases across wide-open spaces, you’ll race toward the satisfying climax without caring about anything else.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05104-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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