The elegant writing, complex characters, and surprising conclusion of Thomas’ second (The English Boys, 2016) all add up to...
A cold case turns hot enough to burn lives to the ground.
DCI Robert McIntyre has come from the Cornwall town of Truro to spend Christmas with his brother’s family in London. Still depressed over the departure of his lover, Alison Kendall, whose first novel has become a bestseller, he finds his brother's house empty—David and his family have been called away—and is startled when Iris Flynn shows up on the doorstep in the middle of the night saying she's flown halfway around the world to help him find her daughter’s killer. The Flynns were living in Truro when their eldest daughter, Sophie, disappeared along with her nanny, Karen Peterson, more than a year earlier. Sophie's body was found in the river the next day, and Karen hasn't been seen since. Before this traumatic episode, Iris and Nick, her Australian husband, had led a peripatetic existence, moving from country to country: "It's Nick," Iris says. "The world is too small for him." It was in Oregon, their last stop before Britain, that they met Karen, who asked if she could come with them and help out with the kids. Now, unable to recover from Sophie’s death, Iris has left Nick and their two other daughters with her sister in Australia in a desperate bid to find the truth. The only new clue the police have is a psychic who claims to have had a vision of Karen in London. The police artist makes a sketch based on the psychic's description that Iris doesn’t think looks like Karen, but after watching hours of CCTV she picks her former nanny out of the crowd boarding a London train. The passport service, however, finds no record of a Karen Peterson ever having entered the U.K. Even though Iris has an estranged mother and brother in Cornwall, she winds up staying with McIntyre when they return to Truro; he feels desperately sorry for the woman whose life has been torn apart and finds her company comforting in his loneliness. Unable to forget Alison, he's taken aback when the case takes a strange and unsettling turn and involves his former love in a way he cannot ignore no matter how painful the results. At length more clues emerge, and when Iris does go to see her mother, a chance encounter brings the case to disconcerting new life.
The elegant writing, complex characters, and surprising conclusion of Thomas’ second (The English Boys, 2016) all add up to a fine mystery that will appeal to readers of Catriona McPherson’s psychological thrillers.Pub Date: July 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5250-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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