A largely satisfying second volume that brings new plot threads to the Element series.
Jenny O’Rourke continues her investigation into her family’s occult connections in this, the second volume of the Element series of mysteries.
A few months after her father was arrested along with the other leaders of his secret society—dubbed “the Punishers” by the media—O’Rourke hopes the cult’s crimes are history. Then she sees on the news that her friend Katie Dorcy has been found dead in the creek behind Red Rock Farm. It is the same farm where Jenny grew up and where the order conducted its deadly rituals. Jenny is still traumatized by her own near fatal run-in with the order, and the cult’s infamy has made a tourist attraction of her tiny hometown of Brandtville, Pennsylvania, now known as “Bloody Brandtville.” Jenny can’t help but blame herself for Katie’s death, and she and her boyfriend, Ryan Brandt (whose father was also one of the Punishers) set to work investigating it. A symbol found on Katie’s body suggests that one of the Punishers is still at large and may be trying to reestablish the order. When Jenny runs into a figure from her past, an opportunity presents itself: Can she discover the truth about what happened to Katie by joining the order herself? In this second volume of the Element trilogy, Slawecki writes with urgency and imagination, speeding the plot along between sinister locations and tense interactions. The primary flaw, such as it is, is that the characters tend to speak in the melodramatic vernacular of reality TV contestants. (Even the narration sometimes slips into this language. When Jenny learns that Katie’s husband suspects that she was having an affair, she thinks, “Whoa! Mind blown. She never mentioned any of this to me.”) While the informality is sometimes a mood-killer, it is by no means a book-ruiner, and the story is intricate enough to keep the reader invested. Both the author and Jenny take the threats seriously enough to prevent the more contrived elements of the plot from pushing the book into the realm of camp. Fans of The Da Vinci Code or True Detective will enjoy this maximalist mix of crime, conspiracy, and the occult.
A largely satisfying second volume that brings new plot threads to the Element series.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73460-043-8
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Graylyn Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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