Subtle and complex chess game of a thriller, with an interesting insider’s view of contemporary Cuba.
A straight-shooting Cuban exile gets mixed up in an elaborate multi-million-dollar scheme.
The story begins with parallel protagonists. Colonel Victoria Valiente was born on the day that dictator Batista fled Cuba, a seeming omen of her future success in the Communist regime. As a star in the General Directorate of Intelligence, Victoria was a true believer. Hastening her disillusion is her romance with brilliant mathematician Manuel Pardo, whom she marries in 1991. Having worked extensively in North America and Europe, Pardo develops a more cynical view of Cuba. In the new Cuba, money and power will be the keys to success. The couple begins to formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Cuban exile Elliot Steil (he’s lived in Miami for eight years but maintains his citizenship in Cuba, where he worked for over a decade as an English teacher) takes a meeting with Maria Scheindlin, the beautiful young widow of his boss Ruben, recently deceased. Elliot was personal assistant to Scheindlin, whose considerable business interests stretched from Miami across the Caribbean. Maria expresses interest in learning about her husband’s affairs and Elliot obliges, in a series of meetings. Elliot’s longtime love, Fidelia, arranges a small birthday party for the emotional Lidia, married to Tony Soto, a Miami cop and Elliot’s friend and former student in Cuba. Fidelia detests the sleazy Tony, in no small part because of his abuse of Lidia, and wishes Elliot would avoid him. Tony arranges a sub rosa meeting for Elliot with a pair of FBI agents, Hart and McLellan, who request and then blackmail Elliot into cooperation. The Feebies correctly describe what will happen next: Victoria and Manuel approach Elliot in Cuba about a large sum of money that the deceased Scheindlin owed them. Would Elliot be kind enough to arrange its return?
Subtle and complex chess game of a thriller, with an interesting insider’s view of contemporary Cuba.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1810-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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