Armament-heavy spycraft as British Military Intelligence tries to unravel the murder of an agent in Dresden, apparently by Neo- Nazis, while the blood flows. Typical Egleton (A Double Deception, Last Act, etc.) and neither better nor worse than his usual fruitcake of falling bodies mixed with broken nutshells of military specs—not to mention paragraphs stuffed with acronyms, hardware, exotic place names, ranking within military castes and intelligence services. The story here, laid out in three acts, starts in Dresden when British intelligence agent Captain Robert Whittle meets with Starshii Leitenant Gulina Kutuzova of the GRU to trade consumer goods and $200 for Gulina's low-grade info on Red Army units. Following the meet, Whittle dies in a car bomb explosion—a Neo-Nazi rally is being held at the same time—while Gulina disappears. Has she defected? If so, where to? Although Whittle's death is of only passing interest to the newspapers, MI5 feels morally obliged to get to the bottom of the event and assigns dependable agent Peter Ashton to find Gulina, the last person to have seen Whittle alive. Gulina's only real tie with another human being is with her mother Lydia, and Ashton sets off for Leningrad and Moscow to track down Lydia. But Americanski-speaking Gulina has fled by Swiss-Air to Montreal and hence hiphopped to Las Vegas, where she has reluctantly allowed herself to be taken under the wing of an athletic lesbian—a financial wizard who knows how to beat the wheel. Along with Ashton and American agent Tony Zale, Red Army agents are hot on her heels. The McGuffin has to do with a breakaway maverick unit within the Red Army, which has planted a string of atomic land mines in East Germany to protect the former USSR from invasion by the new GDR. Pages greased with Cosmoline, mentally quite slippery and hard to hang onto.
Pub Date: June 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08812-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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
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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
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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