by K.E. Bombard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2017
A meticulously arranged mystery in which technology and classic literature collide.
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This second installment of a series finds a New England prep school rocked by heroin overdoses.
The Moonus Dawkins School is an elite prep school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Within 10 days, however, two senior students have died of drug overdoses: Mitchel Young, a popular academic ace, and Ron Eastwood, a talented musician and loner. Enter Drug Enforcement Administration agent Jason Kraft, who’s been covertly inserted into Dawkins as a teacher. His class is “Social Media in the Digital Age,” and both deceased students had been attending before his arrival. Helping Kraft is Alondra Espinoza, a vacationing FBI agent—and his fiancee. The probe immediately adopts a surreal flavor when Molly Stark, from the DEA’s media unit, subjects Kraft to an interview aimed at dissecting his current case for the purpose of training new recruits. She insists on knowing the vital details of the inquiry and Kraft’s methodology, which doesn’t sit well with him. Kraft also teams up with David Ellinghood, a local detective, and befriends professor Jim Soulmer. The investigation soon reveals that Mitchel, a dedicated pilot-in-training, would not be able to get his flier’s license, and he and his girlfriend, Hillary Barrymore, had been going through a rough patch. Then, an interview with Mitchel’s roommate, BJ McGee, suggests that the teen may have been murdered. In this literary thriller, Bombard (TobaccoNet, 2015) delivers an ode to the immortal Sherlock Holmes and the 1891 Arthur Conan Doyle short story “The Red-Headed League.” The Mind and Bones secret society, a system of underground tunnels, and the rumors of flight school hazing add touches of New England noir to picturesque Stockbridge. The author also does a superb job of rotating his multifaceted characters in and out of suspicion (the eloquent Soulmer, for example, convinces a drug dealer that he needs “some pure heaven man”). As Kraft delves further into the complex case, he’s reminded that “we were often struggling with competing good and bad influences in life.” Best of all: more suspicious deaths throughout the narrative keep the tension ratcheted high.
A meticulously arranged mystery in which technology and classic literature collide.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5393-2264-1
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 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
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
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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