Pleasantly enjoyable, especially for its mounting suspense in the latter half.
A very British tale of a widow who struggles to hold her family from splintering apart, to keep the circumstances of her husband’s loss at sea a secret, and to avoid being snared in a police investigation surrounding the supposed shipwreck.
After three months’ abroad, Ellen has finally returned with her two children to their south England town to oversee the memorial service for her husband, Harry, a former member of Parliament and real-estate mogul who was lost at sea two weeks before Ellen’s travels. The service over, Harry’s body and boat are still not found, and Ellen is immediately ensnared in family and business loose ends surrounding his disappearance. His relatives nag her about why she set out traveling so quickly after her husband’s boat went missing. Her accountant, despairing of the terrible financial mess Harry has left behind, questions whether there are any hidden family funds to live on. At first, and for perhaps a trifle too long, author Francis (A Dark Devotion, 1998; Betrayal, 1996; etc.) gives hints of suspense, leading us through a moody story of a widow dealing with probate when there is no body to prove the death. Then a charity worker accuses Harry of having misappropriated £300,000, a piece of hate mail arrives accusing him of Falklands War misdoings, and evidence emerges that he might have sexually abused his adopted daughter (from Ellen’s first marriage). Suddenly, Harry is not just an amateur yachtsman who went to sea in the wrong weather but a possible suicide or murder victim, with his wife, in the case of the latter, one of the chief suspects. It’s Ellen’s contortions of the truth, either trying to protect her children from the shame of her late husband’s misdoings or to protect herself from being charged with murder—Francis keeps us unsure which—that lends this book its title.
Pleasantly enjoyable, especially for its mounting suspense in the latter half.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-239-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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