Shifts in time, place, and point of view make this Simms-Fennimore case harder to follow than its predecessor. But the two...
U.S. crime-fighting units get much-needed help from the U.K.
For five years, Scottish forensic scientist Nick Fennimore has been searching for his young daughter, who disappeared after his wife was murdered. In spite of a promising new clue, he has to leave the case behind, at least geographically, for business in the U.S. He’s wangled a speaking engagement in St. Louis in hopes of meeting with and getting help from Chief Inspector Kate Simms, who’s temporarily attached to the St. Louis PD in a method-exchange program. Although the murky past they’ve shared (Everyone Lies, 2014) makes Kate reluctant to see Fennimore, she has little choice when he becomes part of an Oklahoma team with the same goal as the St. Louis task force: find out who’s responsible for torturing and eventually killing a series of women and abducting their children. In at least three cases, the women were recovering addicts devoted to their children, whom the perp uses as leverage over their mothers, and the sadistic M.O. is practically identical in each grisly crime. Haunted by the parallels between these cases and his own tragedy, Fennimore finds temporary relief with Abigail Hicks, a tough, young Oklahoma deputy sheriff who will do what it takes to apprehend the killer. Meantime, the young son of the latest victim has escaped from the killer. But the boy, who fears the police as much as the man who murdered his mother, won’t seek the help the combined crime solvers would give him if only they could find him. The teams gradually realize that they're up against an even more complex adversary than they thought—and that time is running out.
Shifts in time, place, and point of view make this Simms-Fennimore case harder to follow than its predecessor. But the two authors writing as Garrett evoke not only the suspense of serial killings, but an emotional triangle and a tantalizingly unresolved crime that keep the pages flying.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04573-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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