An accomplished launch of a promising new spirituality-focused small-town series.
Penny Pound, divorced mom, schoolteacher and church organist, gets caught up in the investigations that follow a deadly blaze at a student’s home in this first installment of a planned series.
Penny Pound is a third-grade teacher in Redfield, Ohio, in 1990. She also serves as organist at the nearby Episcopal church, led by the kindly Rev. Huddleston. Offbeat, yet deeply engaged with her students, Penny feels under scrutiny since she doesn’t always follow the school’s curriculum. It doesn’t help that her professor ex-husband convinced their 15-year-old son, Sam, to live with him and only visit her on weekends. Still, she has supportive friends—African-American school psychologist Glory, fellow newbie teacher Robin and choirmaster Andrew. Her retired cop father calls to tell her about a fire at the home of her student Keith. The circumstances are peculiar: Keith’s mother is acting strangely, her current boyfriend and ex-husband have criminal pasts, and Keith’s brother, who perished in the blaze, was drugged. A multilayered investigation ensues. Penny soon meets firefighter Jake Richards and experiences combustible attraction. Then her caring outreach to Keith prompts its own suspicions, leading to a final fiery showdown. First-time novelist Greenwood has created an appealing world that has elements of a cozy as well as the small-town charm and spirituality found in Jan Karon’s Mitford series. Keith’s home life proves to be quite dark and disturbing, which lends a somewhat jarring undertone to this largely folksy narrative. Greenwood addresses this issue squarely, providing several beautifully written, touching scenes that point the way, as do sprinklings of excerpts from prayers and hymns, to this planned series’ focus on redemption, hope and light. Overall, a skillful debut.
An accomplished launch of a promising new spirituality-focused small-town series.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500604523
Page Count: 326
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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