HANGMAN

Name: HANGMAN
Author: Daniel Cole
ISBN: 978-0-06-265398-7

by Daniel Cole ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 24, 2018

Forgettable characters slogging, sometimes literally, through a pile of corpses makes for dull reading, even for readers...

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Reluctantly assigned to a joint task force with the FBI and CIA, a British detective must relive the worst case of her career as a copycat killer appears determined to match the prior perp’s carnage on both sides of the pond.

In this jumbled, excessively violent follow-up to Ragdoll, (2017), DCI Emily Baxter, still smarting from her physical and emotional wounds, wants nothing more to do with the Ragdoll case, allegedly linked to her friend and fellow cop William Fawkes, who’s disappeared. But she’s given little choice when her boss assigns her to assist FBI Special Agent Elliot Curtis and CIA Special Agent Damien Rouche on a multinational operation after a corpse is found strung up on the Brooklyn Bridge that bears a striking resemblance to the Ragdoll victims. Baxter travels with Curtis and Rouche to New York, where they find that the similarities to the Ragdoll case are superficial and they’re looking for someone with a greater reach. Baxter, perpetually the petulant child of the three, seems to want only to drink away her miseries back in London, while Rouche and Curtis have their own agendas. Bodies begin to pile up—some with “bait” and some with “puppet” carved into their chests—and acts of domestic terrorism, from a church massacre to a possible attack on a London Tube station, increase, with the investigators no closer to catching the person, or group, responsible. Cole quickly deflates any suspense he may have built up by the sheer number of grisly incidents he crams into the narrative, making the reader numb or, worse, bored by the loss of life. Even the denouement feels as staged as one of the kills, constructed more to draw attention to the carnage than the story.

Forgettable characters slogging, sometimes literally, through a pile of corpses makes for dull reading, even for readers looking for a bloody thrill.

Pub Date: July 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-265398-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

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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

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COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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BADLANDS

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

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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.