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OFF SCRIPT

Not so much mysterious as creepy and just plain sad.

In her third appearance, actress Enora Andressen leads the search for the boy who broke into a woman's flat and threatened her with death before he vanished.

Since an accident left the blind Pavel Sieger, her favorite scriptwriter, paralyzed, Enora’s dedicated herself to making sure he’s well cared for. Now one of his dedicated medical minders, nurse Carrie Tollman, has been the victim of an encounter so harrowing Enora has to drag the details out of her. She awoke to find a teenager bending over her. The intruder stared at her, assured her that he can get through any locked door, attempted to masturbate, and then, when she laughed at him and ordered him to leave, told her that if she shared her story with anyone else, “he’d come back and kill me. Just like he’d killed the others.” Sure enough, soon after Enora unearths enough information to allow the Exmouth police to arrest a boy they then have to release for lack of evidence, she returns to Carrie’s place to find her slashed to death. Even when an oddly literal clue allows Enora to put a name to the presumed culprit, he’s nowhere to be found. Enora’s only solace is the distractions of an unwelcome visit from her teenage son, Malo, and a much more welcome romance with builder/sailor/“chancer” Deko, a relationship that despite some exhilarating adventures turns out to have disturbing complications of its own.

Not so much mysterious as creepy and just plain sad.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-7278-8979-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Severn House

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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LABYRINTH

Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.

Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.

Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.

Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.

Pub Date: July 30, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

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THE HIGHWAY

Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...

The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.

The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.

Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.

Pub Date: July 30, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013

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