McCormack (The Paradise Motel, 1989) presses his subtitle into service to stiffen a modishly inconclusive investigation into a mysterious plague that's ravaged the population of a troubled village. Located on a place referred to as ``the Island,'' the town of Carrick, as apprentice reporter James Maxwell learns when he's invited by an acquaintance to visit, is doubly haunted. Virtually every native of the town is dead or dying, stricken with a deadly bacterium that causes defects in speech or syntax, makes its victims uncomfortably garrulous and self-revealing, and kills them. The town has been stricken in other ways as well: Animals have collapsed and died, statuary and headstones have been defaced, and a shepherd's been murdered and mutilated. The cause of all this might have seemed to be the interloping hydrologist Martin Kirk—except that Kirk himself fell (or was pushed) onto the track of a speeding train before the plague began. As he interviews the dying villagers, Maxwell realizes the town is haunted by its past as well: by a POW camp, where enemy soldiers were held during ``the War,'' hiding a shameful secret; by a collapsing bridge and a mine explosion that decimated the natives many years ago; and by a tangle of romantic liaisons. Eventually Robert Aiken, the pharmacist Maxwell suspects of mass poisoning, confesses to the murders, but his confession leaves so many questions unanswered- -Why did he kill his friends and neighbors? Why did they die without protest? Why did he poison himself?—that the real mystery may be why he confessed at all to a crime he may never have committed. There's nothing wrong with McCormack's conclusion that dead certainties may turn out to be unwarranted speculations. But it's a little late for yesterday's news to deliver the thrill of unknowing he presumably intends, especially when his storytelling apparatus— unreliable narratives, guesswork, theories, and countertheories—takes such pains to blot out the brooding tale that may or may not lie beneath.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11320-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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