HUNTING THE FIVE POINT KILLER

Name: HUNTING THE FIVE POINT KILLER
Author: C.M. Wendelboe
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5320-1

by C.M. Wendelboe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2017

A slow-burning cold case with copious clues, conscientious detection, a high body count, periodic interruptions from the...

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The chronicler of FBI agent Manny Tanno (Death on the Greasy Grass, 2013, etc.) launches a new series that brings a retired Denver cop back to his roots, and a lot of other people’s, in Cheyenne.

Even though they date back 10 years, TV reporter Ana Maria Villarreal’s station manager, DeAngelo Damos, thinks it would boost ratings if she did a special on the deaths of three Cheyenne police detectives less than a month apart. Everybody’s always believed that Steve DeBoer died in a house fire he accidentally set when he fell asleep smoking, and Gaylord Fournier’s death was a pretty obvious case of erotic autoasphyxiation. But Butch Spangler was shot by a gun that vanished from the death scene, and although Lt. Ned Oblanski’s always suspected Frank Dull Knife, the ex-con who was sleeping with Hannah Spangler, he’s never been able to find enough evidence to put him away. Enter Arn Anderson, formerly of Denver Homicide, who’s returned to his hometown and signed on as a consultant to the TV station to reopen the case. You can imagine how that goes over with Oblanski and Acting Chief Johnny White. Anderson wastes no time allowing Ana Maria to talk her way into an investigation he’d sworn to keep her at arm’s length from, acquiring an unlikely new sidekick, attracting a rash of anonymous demands to stop asking questions, getting bashed over the head, and rekindling his relationship with Butch’s sister, Gloria Spangler, the former cheerleader he dated in high school. In between these distractions, he patiently zeroes in on the Five Point Killer—who killed two still-earlier victims—that all three of the dead cops had been trying desperately to identify in the weeks before they died.

A slow-burning cold case with copious clues, conscientious detection, a high body count, periodic interruptions from the killer’s viewpoint, and all the pages and pages of unraveling you’d expect from such a generously plotted mystery.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5320-1

Page Count: 456

Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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THE MARSHAL AND THE MYSTICAL MOUNTAIN
by C.M. Wendelboe

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HUNTING THE SATURDAY NIGHT STRANGLER
by C.M. Wendelboe

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THE MARSHAL AND THE MOONSHINER
by C.M. Wendelboe

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
EVIL BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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THREE BAGS FULL

A SHEEP DETECTIVE STORY

by Leonie Swann & translated by Anthea Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2007

All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...

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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.