Among the most action-packed of Buckley’s always-engrossing looks at Elizabethan lives and times.
Being related to a queen is no sinecure for a widow with heavy responsibilities.
Ursula Stannard, whose status as the illegitimate half sister of Queen Elizabeth I has often pressed her into service as a spy for the queen (A Deadly Betrothal, 2017, etc.), is taking a breather to raise her young son, watch over her estates and stud farm, and enjoy life. At Richmond Palace for a visit with Elizabeth, who wants her advice on a proposed marriage to the French Prince Francis, Duke of Alençon and Anjou—who’s Catholic and therefore not beloved of the English people—Ursula must also fight off marriage proposals. Although Elizabeth, who’s already dealing with the difficult problem of Mary Stuart, a magnet for schemes to restore Catholicism to England, enjoys the prince’s company, she has qualms about both the physical side of marriage and the power he’d have over her. Agreeing to inquire into local feelings, Ursula is delighted to go home to Hawkswood even though she must hire a new stud groom and a tutor for 9-year-old Harry. The new tutor turns out to be the son of her trusted servant Brockley, a son he never knew he had. Disaster strikes when Harry vanishes while out riding; a painstaking search turns up no sign of him. Then Ursula is attacked, her dogs are killed, and she’s rolled in a carpet and carried off. Her captors reveal that they’re holding Harry as a guarantee that she’ll agree to assassinate Mary. They even give her a phial of hemlock to do the deed. A visit to the queen and her spymaster gets her the permission she needs. As she goes to Mary’s side pretending to seek her death, she leaves Brockley to do everything in his power to rescue Harry.
Among the most action-packed of Buckley’s always-engrossing looks at Elizabethan lives and times.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78029-103-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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