Worth celebrating, not for the tangled story, but for gems like Lula’s four ways of managing stress: “There’s drugs, there’s...
Does the legacy of her Uncle Pip’s lucky bottle really bring Stephanie Plum good fortune? You be the judge.
There’s never been a better need for a lucky break at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds. Cousin Vinnie has been kidnapped by Bobby Sunflower, the new boss of Mickey Gritch, the bookie to whom Vinnie racked up an improbable debt of $786,000. Even though Vinnie’s father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, has sold ownership of the firm to the venture-capital firm The Wellington Company, it’s clear that without Vinnie, there’ll be no employment for Stephanie, his bounty hunter, or Lula, his file clerk, wheelman and fashionista. So they’re highly motivated to rescue him or come up with enough cash to pay off his debt. Rescuing him means going up against Sunflower’s goons; paying up means bringing in some major Failures to Appear—bigamist/shoplifter Dirk McCurdle, alligator-friendly Choppers (né Eugene Gonzolez), leviathan exhibitionist Butch Goodey—or robbing some of Sunflower’s collection points so that they can pay him off with his own money. Since this bestselling series (Finger Lickin’ Fifteen, 2009, etc.) is more interested in crazy characters and wisecracks than plot, it’s not giving too much away to say that Stephanie and Lula, with occasional help from Det. Joe Morelli, Stephanie’s main squeeze, and much more frequent help from dark-knight security agent Ranger, Stephanie’s other squeeze, try every single one of these strategies, and they all work, sort of.
Worth celebrating, not for the tangled story, but for gems like Lula’s four ways of managing stress: “There’s drugs, there’s alcohol, there’s sex, and there’s doughnuts.”Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-38330-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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