You won’t put down this powerful and painful tale, the first in a planned series, until you’ve seen its unlikely hero...
A man whose whole life has been colored by the excesses of his father’s execrable ministry tries to come to terms with his past.
Earl Marcus’ daddy, RJ, was a white Georgia mountain preacher, a snake handler who let no sin go unpunished, especially those of his rebellious 17-year-old son. RJ let Earl's sister die by refusing her a doctor, since only God could cure her, and stood by for five days after Earl was bitten by one of his cottonmouths, insisting that divine will would determine his life or death. After impregnating his brother’s girlfriend, Earl is blamed for her suicide. When he refuses to repent, his daddy disowns him, and he’s taken in by a loving black woman widely known as Granny. Years later, when Coulee County sheriff’s deputy Mary Hawkins writes to tell him that Granny, who is actually her grandmother, is dying, he takes time away from his job as a private investigator in North Carolina to spend time with her—a visit that brings him nightmares, releases repressed memories, and lands Mary and him in a truly dangerous situation. A letter from church member Bryant McCauley with a recently time-stamped photo of Earl's supposedly dead and buried father forces him to confront his past and his love/hate relationship with the man he calls Daddy. With McCauley missing, Earl sees that Coulee County hasn’t changed. The corrupt sheriff still hates him, blaming him for his daughter’s death, and Holy Flame, the cultlike church where his older brother, Lester, is now the preacher, seems to be controlled by their father from beyond the grave. In fact, many members, still believing RJ is alive, turn on Lester, who’s trying to make the church more mainstream. Earl uncovers unspeakable acts of violence against young female congregants. Joined by a few rebels and pariahs like himself, he fights his inner demons to discover the truth about his father and the evil machinations of misogynist church members.
You won’t put down this powerful and painful tale, the first in a planned series, until you’ve seen its unlikely hero explore all the avenues of love, hate, deception, and faith and unravel a gripping mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68331-391-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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