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FLASHPOINT

A lesser installment in the colorful career of Dev (Blindside, 2012, etc.), who sounds perfectly sincere when he maintains...

Skullduggery-cum-homicide threatens yet another of Chicago political consultant Dev Conrad’s clients.

Robert Logan may be the incumbent senator from Illinois, but his eye for the ladies makes him vulnerable to all sorts of family-values innuendo and worse. The loyalties of his wife, Elise, and his coed daughter Maddy, already tested by a fling he had years ago, are stretched to the limit by his fascination with Tracy Cabot, the mysterious glamourpuss who turns up at one campaign event after another. Tracy obviously represents some sort of trap for the candidate, but her true potential for sowing havoc isn’t realized until she turns up beaten to death in Logan’s fishing cabin in rural Linton. The campaign immediately goes into entertaining overdrive to protect the candidate from the heaviest mudslinging. Dev gets hotshot attorney Ben Zuckerman to fly into Linton, bribes hotel bellman Earl Leonard to let him turn over Tracy’s hotel room, and churns the waters looking for material to use in a counterattack against Logan’s opponent, folksy insurance-exec millionaire Charlie Shay. The candidate goes on TV to offer condolences to Tracy’s family and blandly assure the voters that he had nothing to do with her death. In short, it’s all business as usual. Even Dev’s contact with Howie Ruskin, the political saboteur with whom Tracy was working to bring down Logan, seems familiar as well, at least until Ruskin gets shot. Even so, it’s hard getting worked up over rumors of a conspiracy against Logan when so many of the cast members are conspiracy theorists and when it’s pretty obvious that at least some of them are onto something.

A lesser installment in the colorful career of Dev (Blindside, 2012, etc.), who sounds perfectly sincere when he maintains that “[p]olitical consultants pray every waking moment.”

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-7278-8300-1

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Severn House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013

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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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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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