An extended drama that should satisfy fans of the genre.
The murder of an inmate five years before casts a long shadow in this ambitious but unfocused drama set in a maximum security prison.
Marion Richardson, derisively called “Ego” (but not to his face), is the major of the guard at the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. “Someday I’m gonna be warden, and nothing’s gonna stop me,” he proclaims. His rise up the prison hierarchy is threatened by his involvement in the murder of inmate Earl Davis, which he orchestrated in the late 1960s. Five years later, Ego is the prison’s recently promoted security director, but his tenuous grip on command is shaken by the arrival of Shirleen, the prison’s new inmate complaint investigator. She is actually an undercover agent investigating Davis’ death; she’s Davis’ sister, too. Had Smullen focused solely on the malevolent Ego, the book might have been a more gripping character study. Ego at times makes Lou Ford, the depraved deputy sheriff in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952), look like Andy Taylor from Mayberry. But Smullen subverts the pitiless Ego with jarring scenes of him folding under pressure. Taking a phone call from a lawyer with blackmail on his mind causes Ego to feel “as if some supernatural creature had just ripped out his heart, encased it in ice, and then reinserted it into his chest in one hideously swift move.” Smullen has grander designs on his narrative, too. Transitioning from present to past with unnumbered, italicized segments between chapters, Smullen chronicles the creation of the prison and its earlier days, which were no less corrupt or violent. Ego’s inevitable downfall is counterpointed by the redemption story of Zak Griffin, an alcoholic Vietnam vet who falls in love with Shirleen. Smullen, who spent nearly three decades as an educator in the Wisconsin state prison system, writes convincingly about prison life, as in an episode in which Ego’s cellblock arrival is announced among the population by a succession of flushing toilets. The dialogue, like something out of a direct-to-video prison movie (“What do ya want—we should cut our hands and become blood brothers? I hafta trust you and you hafta trust me”) is less convincing.
An extended drama that should satisfy fans of the genre.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492145103
Page Count: 436
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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