A thought-provoking, disturbing, and engaging mystery with a likable, strong-willed female lead.
In this eighth installment of a mystery series, an epidemiologist waiting to testify in a federal trial becomes involved in a murder investigation that hits close to home.
Gil Andrews, chief of police for Mercado, New Mexico, appears at Sara Almquist’s door in the gated community of La Bendita, and she sees immediately that something is amiss. She and Gil worked together on a drug gang bust that is about to come to trial. Sara is the feds’ most credible witness. But Gil’s questions are not those of a colleague. He finally reveals that Lurleen Jansen, Sara’s friend and former neighbor, has been brutally slashed to death. Lurleen’s daughter, Mitzi, who called the police after discovering her mother’s body, has implied that Sara might be involved in the death. Sara was with the woman the previous day, driving her to New Mexico’s El Santuario de Chimayó pilgrimage site, where Lurleen could obtain some “holy dirt” to help her grandson. Naturally, Sara ultimately is brought in to help with the investigation. As the narrative unspools, readers learn just how desperately dysfunctional the Jansen family is. Its members provide plenty of suspects: Pete, Lurleen’s estranged husband; Mitzi; Mitzi’s two adopted children, 12-year-old Matt and 13-year-old Kayla (both psychologically damaged); and Lurleen’s son, Bill. Things become more complicated when someone begins stalking and threatening Sara. Is someone trying to prevent her upcoming testimony? The feds are worried. In a story propelled more by basic detective work than high-tension action, subplots involving several secondary characters provide additional satisfying drama. And series followers should enjoy the continuing saga of the relationship between Sara and her significant other, Eric Sanders. Pete, a chemical engineer and expert on detecting and dealing with polluted water supplies, serves as Greger’s narrative connector to her stated underlying theme—“that water is essential for life and is considered holy in many cultures but it is also often polluted.” Yet the weaving together of theme and murder mystery, albeit intriguing and informative, sometimes feels thin, more like a contrivance than a critical component of the primary plotline.
A thought-provoking, disturbing, and engaging mystery with a likable, strong-willed female lead.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Bug Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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