A transplant patient finds that he’s bought into a lot more than another man’s heart, in this greased-lightning thriller from the Pulitzer-winning crime reporter best known for her Britt Montero mysteries (Margin of Error, 1997, etc.). Overwhelmed with gratitude at the donor whose heart saved his life, Frank Douglas isn’t satisfied with all the rules about confidentiality; despite his private eye’s warning that the man who gave him a second chance at life probably wasn’t a model citizen—now that traffic fatalities are down, most organ donors are shooting victims—he wants to locate the donor’s family and thank them. And the donor he finds, suicidal businessman Daniel Alexander, turns out to be too good to be true: a man who piled up a substantial estate and left behind a tender note for his wife Rory before he blew his brains out. But just as Frank’s disturbing dreams and flashbacks (as if his new heart were remembering its old life) are starting to get to him, and his family’s behavior—his own wife Kathleen doesn’t like the time he’s spending with Rory; his teenaged daughter Shandi is defying her grounding and seeing a much older man—Frank starts to find holes in the official story of Daniel’s death. In the weeks before he died, it turns out, he carefully cleaned out all the nest eggs he’d left for Rory; his body was cremated as soon as its vital organs had been harvested; and his closemouthed ex-partner Ron Harrington is killed minutes before his meeting with Frank. Could Daniel have been murdered, despite all the forensic evidence—or could he still be alive, leaving Frank with a stranger’s heart? There’s no leisure to worry about the subtleties of these questions, because Frank’s growing intimacy with Rory has Kathleen putting pressure on him back home—pressure that’ll chase him from Florida all the way to the Pacific one step ahead of the police. Buchanan rides her irresistible premise hell-for-leather all the way to the fairy-tale ending. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97331-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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
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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