A largely enjoyable mystery that barrels toward an unexpected climax.
In Hester’s (The Bottoms Up Murder, 2013) second Jonas Lauer mystery, a skeleton in a whiskey barrel brews up trouble for the sheriff of Monroe County, Tennessee.
It’s rarely good news when the phone rings in the middle of the night; it’s no exception when Sheriff Lauer takes a post-midnight call at the start of this tale of Southern-style homicide. A park ranger has found a skeleton in a Jack Daniels barrel, buried under some Bradford pear trees. When Lauer investigates the next day, he finds that the barrel also contains a moneybag. He thinks it could be from the now-shuttered Monroe County Bank, which was notoriously held up 44 years ago by local robber Gale Marlowe, who took off in a biplane that was waiting for him at the county airport and was never seen again. Could this skeleton be his? Assisting Lauer are forensic lab supervisor Molly Newman, medical examiner Karen Long, and former county sheriff Bill Hays, who was incarcerated a few years back for killing his wife and her lover. But identifying the bones isn’t Lauer’s only problem: A ranting sexagenarian wants him to give her husband a lie-detector test to see if he’s having an affair with a former porn star; members of a militia are in town, for reasons undetermined; and even Lauer’s girlfriend’s ex pops up. Hester has a nice ear for dialogue (“[H]e died of a heart attack. Shoot that was no surprise there, the man had bacon with about every meal he ate”) and a sharp way of making a point (“Teeth don’t lie”). Overall, his characters and scenes seem authentic, from shootouts to wake-up sex. Occasionally, however, commas are distractingly missing, and the descriptions, while generally strong, can be overdone; for example, there’s no need to describe the color of every character’s eyes, be they “cobalt,” “doe brown,” “emerald” or hazel “that went elliptical.”
A largely enjoyable mystery that barrels toward an unexpected climax.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500240158
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2014
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
