Bombs, bullets, and killings galore in a third adventure for bodyguard Atticus Kodiak. After burning up a dozen pages untangling loose ends from Finder (1997), Rucka brings his brooding, sufficiently alienated noirish action hero, who drinks boutique beer and bakes his own bread, within spitting distance of his erstwhile employer, Elliott Trent. Trent, though leery of Kodiak’s lone-wolf ways, still wants him to guard Carter Dean (a.k.a. Jeremiah Pugh), a sleazy New York yuppie who’s been getting death threats from the brothers of a woman Dean refuses to marry. Kodiak, living under a cloud from botched jobs in his past, reluctantly accepts, letting Natalie, Trent’s estranged daughter and Kodiak’s current lover, lend an assist. After Natalie blows away a machine-gun—toting killer, Trent informs Kodiak that the dead man was the infamous “John Doe,” one of ten international assassins so accomplished that nobody knows who they are, what they look like, when they’re about to strike, or how to hire them. Soon enough, Kodiak learns that Carter Dean was a decoy used to lure John Doe into the open. It seems that Doe has been hired to kill the real Jeremiah Pugh, a former tobacco industry executive prepared to offer damning testimony in a lawsuit against his former company. But not even Neil Lamia, the industry’s pricey lawyer, can believe his good-ole-boy clients would sic a deluxe hit man on Pugh. Kodiak and his bodyguard buddies soon become victims themselves in an absurdist drama as they routinely question, doubt, then deny that far-fetched villainy is afoot, only to discover bombs, bullets, and worse awaiting them around the corner. Kodiak not only has to protect Pugh from further assaults but has to figure out, from among a pack of suspects (both male and female), just who John Doe really is. Tiresome, preposterous plotting in an otherwise compelling tale filled with well-drawn, believable people and nicely turned- out scenes.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10716-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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