Another solid outing for Cutler, who never lets her interest in Lina’s developing relationships cloud her eye for the puzzle.
Antiques restorer Lina Townend (Guilt Edged, 2013, etc.) gets her knickers in a knot when she suspects that someone’s stealing an old woman’s treasures.
As Lina’s elderly partner, Griff Tripp, has healed nicely from his bypass operation, he’s decided to pay it forward by joining a church team that brings Communion to shut-ins. But blind, confused Dodie Boulton worries Griff. He’s sure that along with a lot of cheap bric-a-brac, she owned a valuable netsuke mouse that’s gone missing. Visiting a market fair, Lina finds the keepsake for sale at a booth run by Devon Cottage Antiques, whose dodgy owner, Arthur Habgood, once accused Lina of trading in stolen goods. Once she’s returned Dodie’s mouse, Lina is afraid that accusing Habgood would just seem like payback. But while vowing to keep a better eye on Dodie’s belongings, she’s drawn into a more serious case when she interrupts a burglary at St. Sidwell’s, a Preservation Trust church west of Dartmoor. The thwarted thieves take note of her distinctively marked van. Soon, not even her friendship with DS Carwyn Morgan can protect her from retaliation. Lina tries to relax with Pilates, trying even harder to make gal pals out of fellow students Laura and Honey. But as Griff worries about how to provide for Lina after his impending demise, the fallout from her investigation makes him wonder whether she’ll actually survive him.
Another solid outing for Cutler, who never lets her interest in Lina’s developing relationships cloud her eye for the puzzle.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8536-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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