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A FACE AT THE WINDOW

McFarland's old strengths (The Music Room, 1990; School for the Blind, 1994) are less evident this time: His often golden style survives, but psychology and focus are bungled in this tale of a man paying for the sins of his past through encounters with ghosts in the present. Cookson Selway travels for a month in London with his wife Ellen, a writer of mystery novels who wants to do location research. The couple book into the quaint Hotel Willerton, where all seems fine until Cook begins acting strangely, cursing in his sleep, waking up exhausted and reeking of whiskey—all signs of relapse into the depraved life of drugs and booze he'd lived earlier while making his millions as a drugged and dishonest restaurateur in Manhattan and before the purifying miracle of his daughter Jordie's birth (Jordie, now a teenager, is in boarding school back in Cambridge). As much as Ellen pleads, and as much as Cook swears he'll pull himself together, ``The Strange Business at the Hotel Willerton'' forms a spiral downward—though a painfully slow one as hint after pseudo-Jamesian hint crawls by (``This wordy explanation will have to do. It's the only one I have'') before the ``ghosts'' in the old hotel finally manifest themselves openly by sucking energy from the living Cook. By that time, the ghosts' tales of family murder and long-ago vileness will seem related only distantly to the sins of Cook's own reams-ago and dimly remembered life (his redneck father, one cause of early Cookian guilt, murdered a black man and got off easy), and what takes over instead of deepening character are the mechanics of how ghosts function and what they do. `` `I'm very tired,' '' one of them says, `` `This takes a toll, you know, all this emerging. It's a great pleasure in its own way, but it does take a toll.' '' Many will concur at the finish of this tiresome book that aimed high, but got paled out, then hit low. (Literary Guild selection; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)

Pub Date: March 17, 1997

ISBN: 0-553-06694-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Broadway

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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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BADLANDS

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

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