Given the severe economy of both successful criminal activity and detective work, following the easygoing footsteps of the...
Prohibition-era park ranger Timothy McIntyre comes to the rescue of a local lodge owner threatened with every conceivable sort of sabotage.
John Frye is so irascible that he’s impossible to love; his few neighbors in Rocky Mountain National Park think of his wife, Hattie, as ever suffering. But that’s no reason, or almost no reason, for someone to be firing bullets at him or setting booby traps designed to electrocute him or destroying his boiler and threatening his Small Delights Lodge with an explosion. McIntyre’s supervisor, Nick Nicholson, who knows that Frye’s been at odds for years with Catherine Croker, the widow who owns nearby Grand Harbor Lodge, wants McIntyre to put an end to their squabbling once and for all. That turns out to be a tall order for several reasons. Neither owner shows any inclination to call off the hostilities. Polly Sheldon, Hattie’s jack-of-all-trades niece, suspects that the attempts on Frye’s life are deliberate near misses intended to scare him into selling his place to Catherine, who covets it more than the fountain of youth, or to the Chicago bootleggers who’ve recently been spotted in the vicinity looking for a toehold. And there’s always the chance that Polly is wrong and that one of the attempts will succeed before McIntyre, a nice enough man but not a towering intellect, can figure out who’s behind them. Looking outside his tiny department, whose leading lights are Russ Frame, a ranger newly arrived from Yosemite, and Charlie Nevis, whose long tenure in the park still hasn’t taught him to tuck in his shirt, McIntyre joins forces with Vi Coteau, assistant to the FBI agent in Denver, for several rounds of low-level sleuthing and some even more low-level socializing.
Given the severe economy of both successful criminal activity and detective work, following the easygoing footsteps of the hero (Ranger McIntyre: Unmentionable Murders, 2018, etc.) is a lot like being on a 1920s vacation, with nothing much to do but take in the sights.Pub Date: April 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4328-5003-6
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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