Ziskin’s nice-but-no-nonsense hero is out seriously past her depth in these fleshpots, where, as she aptly notes, she can’t...
An unsought assignment sends reporter Ellie Stone from upstate New York to Hollywood in the rainy month of February 1962.
New Holland doesn’t send many natives to La-La Land, and Ellie’s editor, Charlie Reese, thinks his readers will want to know how Tony Eberle is faring as the second lead in the monumental epic Twistin’ on the Beach. The answer is not well at all: he’s gone AWOL, Paramount has fired him from the picture, and he’ll never eat lunch in this town again. Foiled in her attempt to get the easy story, Ellie (Heart of Stone, 2016, etc.) grits her teeth and goes after the tough one, which depends on her finding Tony when no one else can. At first there’s little competition for the honor, because once he’s been let go, Tony is the lowest of the low, and no one cares where he is. But the news that Twistin’ producer Bertram Wallis has also disappeared along with the script he wrote for the film The Colonel’s Widow makes Paramount fixer Dorothy Fetterman much more interested in tracking down Tony. And when Wallis turns up dead in a ravine outside his hillside house’s deck, Sgt. John L. Millard, LAPD, joins the hunt. Ellie, who keeps swearing she just wants to meet William Hopper of Perry Mason fame, ends up nosing into every hiding spot in Los Angeles County in search of Tony, his girlfriend, April Kincaid, and that missing script. Her discovery of two out of the three leads to even deeper waters and the suspicion that everyone in Tinseltown is either gay or conspiring against her—except, possibly, for William Hopper.
Ziskin’s nice-but-no-nonsense hero is out seriously past her depth in these fleshpots, where, as she aptly notes, she can’t trust a single person. Readers will end up rooting for her to get sent back to the East Coast, where people just murder each other.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63388-281-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
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
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