AT WHAT COST

Name: AT WHAT COST
Author: James L'Etoile
ISBN: 978-1-62953-995-9

by James L'Etoile ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 13, 2016

The milieu, suspects, and supporting characters are all forgettable, and the killer scarcely puts in an appearance before...

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L’Etoile’s first novel pits a Sacramento police detective against a killer who’s mutilated corpses for the worst possible reason.

High-ranking gangbanger Daniel Cardozo is the third victim of the Outcast Killer, but he carries one final distinction to the grave: he’s the first one whose arms and legs, among other parts, were removed while he was still alive. What makes someone act like the Outcast Killer, wonders Detective John Penley, and how can the homicide squad possibly catch a criminal who’s so obsessively successful in leaving no trace evidence at any of his crime scenes? These are weighty questions, but Penley is grappling with another even weightier: will doctors find a donor kidney for his son, 9-year-old Tommy, whose renal failure is making him sicker and sicker, in time to save his life? As Penley contemplates paying a wraithlike online correspondent $10,000 for a black-market kidney, his quarry, who sees human bodies as boxes of saleable goodies, toys with him in the cruelest possible way, by sending him a recently harvested kidney as a gift. The sequence surrounding the attempted transplant is brutal and harrowing, but it does give Penley important new leads and eventually helps him connect the recent rash of murders to a forgotten past injustice. Just as Penley seems to be closing in on the killer, who’s routinely been two steps ahead of his every maneuver, Tommy is kidnapped, and Penley forgets everything else in his frantic attempt to rescue his ailing son.

The milieu, suspects, and supporting characters are all forgettable, and the killer scarcely puts in an appearance before he’s unmasked as a bogeyman. The results are best suited to nail-biters in search of something to read in a single breathless sitting, though presumably not in a doctor’s waiting room.

Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62953-995-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Crooked Lane

Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

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by Kathy Reichs

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by Kathy Reichs

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by Kathy Reichs

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BADLANDS

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

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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.