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MINING FOR JUSTICE

The eighth in the series contrasts the difficult life of Wisconsin's Cornish miners with the heroine’s burgeoning romance,...

A curator takes on a temporary assignment in a new town.

Chloe Ellefson, a curator of collections at Old World Wisconsin, and her boyfriend, Officer Roelke McKenna of the Eagle Police Department, have taken a trip to Mineral Point, Wisconsin, where Chloe’s helping out at Pendarvis, another site run by the state historical society, and they're both going to assist their friend Adam Bolitho restore an old stone house he owns. Roelke’s upset that his cousin Libby is distancing herself from Adam, who Roelke thinks would be a great partner for her after a nasty divorce. The news that Pendarvis may be closing spells trouble for Chloe with her new colleagues because Old World Wisconsin is lapping up the lion’s share of state funds. Then Adam and Roelke find human remains and artifacts in the root cellar of Adam’s cottage. Adam's grandmother, deeply upset, asks Chloe to do some research to help identify the victim, and Chloe, always a sucker for historical mysteries (A Memory of Muskets, 2016, etc.), agrees. Faced with anger and threatening notes from the staff at Pendarvis, she must count on her friend site curator Claudia Doyle for help. A much less friendly person on site is private researcher Dr. Yvonne Miller, whose snarky, superior attitude annoys everyone. When Yvonne falls dead at Chloe’s feet in Polperro House, her demise becomes just another problem for Chloe to solve. Back in Eagle, Roelke tries to figure out a way to stop his cousin’s dangerously self-satisfied ex-husband from harassing her without getting into trouble himself. All these problems turn out to be rooted in the history Chloe unearths about the Pascoe family, who moved from Cornwall, England, to Mineral Point to carve out a better life for themselves, surmounting many obstacles along the way.

The eighth in the series contrasts the difficult life of Wisconsin's Cornish miners with the heroine’s burgeoning romance, highlighting both her researching skills and her unusual feel for the past.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5334-8

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017

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BADLANDS

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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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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