A stay-up-late-until-it’s-finished mystery with pitch-perfect dialogue, a Southern sexy feel, and empathetic characters on...
In rapid-fire succession, two disappearances and two seemingly unrelated crimes come to the attention of a Tennessee sheriff in this fifth installment of a series.
First, middle-aged Mavis Rutledge, estranged wife of wealthy entrepreneur Emmet Rutledge, is reported missing. Emmet’s known for having recent money trouble, and upon investigation, Sheriff Jonas Lauer learns he has other issues. “A man who has been using drugs, gambling, and is now carrying a gun,” Lauer observes, noting that those three things “rarely ever mix well together.” Still it’s a surprise when a blood-soaked but corpseless scene is discovered on the sailboat Mavis has lived on since splitting from her husband. Then Emmet also vanishes. As does something else—the Veterans Memorial’s 91-pound, 30-by-60-foot flag has been taken hostage for $10,000. No doubt the theft came to life courtesy of a City Hall employee’s pillow talk about the high cost of the flag to a prostitute he paid with stolen municipal funds. Finally something is found, not lost: but it’s a semi delivering to area food marts, and it holds more than pallets of baking ingredients—it’s also packed with heroin. “The Dixie Mafia,” a syndicate that operates “throughout the South,” underpins all these incidents. Mark Russell, an educated and unusual member of the mob, seems to be pulling the strings, or is he just struggling to survive a new crime boss? Regardless, he taunts Lauer with phone calls and questions about his parents and his upcoming nuptials to his fiancee, Lydia Corbett, an investigator for the attorney general’s office. As the body count rises, brief summaries of previous books in this excellent series arrive organically. The pacing roller-coasters from stretches of calm to accelerated heights and unexpected turns, with the occasional inversion of a character or theory. The vibrant dialogue and landscape seem ripe for a quality cable TV miniseries. Hester (The House of Cards Murder, 2016, etc.) writes an engaging, realistic mystery with strong characters, but the real puzzle is why a writer so talented can’t find an editor who can fix the book’s rampant comma errors and other mistakes. Case in point: main character Emmet’s name is spelled alternatingly Emmet and Emmett, sometimes on the same page.
A stay-up-late-until-it’s-finished mystery with pitch-perfect dialogue, a Southern sexy feel, and empathetic characters on both sides of the law.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974143-17-7
Page Count: 436
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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