Private eye Kathleen Stone (The Red Chameleon, 2014) gives her wigs a workout trying to figure out who’s menacing New York’s drag queens.
Everybody loves a parade, except maybe the NYPD, whose members worry that the city’s annual Halloween trek up Sixth Avenue will somehow get out of hand. This year, the boys in blue have a point. As fireworks boom overhead, Darío Rodriguez, known to his fans at the Pink Parrot as Dolly, begins to belt out “Rocket Man.” Suddenly someone in the crowd pushes a juggler tossing fire batons in the air near the Pink Parrot float, setting the papier-mâché stage ablaze, badly burning Dolly and killing fellow performers Bobbie Giabella and Taylor Soto. Grieving over the loss of two of her rising stars, owner Lacy “Big Mamma” Burstyn hires Kathleen to find their killer. She shows her an engraved funeral notice she received forecasting not only Bobbie's and Taylor’s deaths but those of Dolly and fellow performers Herman White, Ravi Sethi, Aaron Kline, Carlton Casborough, and Juniper Summer. Believing the card to be from the homophobic Zeus Society, Kathleen dons a blond wig and a frumpy gray dress to pose as Kate Manning, who asks Zeus leader Cronos Holt to help cure her fictitious gay nephew. In addition, Kathleen asks her old NYPD pal Ellis Dekker to help her infiltrate the Skyview, a members-only club owned by Salvatore Magrelli’s wife, Eva, hoping to catch the mob boss red-handed in some dastardly deed. Ellis’ brother wangles Kathleen’s red-wigged alter-ego Katya a place in a high-stakes poker game, where she watches the dealer crumple and die after a sip of champagne. When Kathleen learns that Ernesto Belasco was also gay, she suspects there’s more nastiness going on at the Skyview than cheating at cards. But connecting Belasco’s death with the fire on the Pink Parrot float will take grit, gumption, and even more disguises.
More concentrated than Kathleen’s debut, Wright’s second entry begins to develop a detective who can shine through all those costume changes.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-893-1
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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