Less playful and more labored than its predecessors but just as ingenious in working one twist after another in a case that...
The third case for Tokyo homicide detective Shunpei Kusanagi and professor Manabu Yukawa, who teaches physics at Imperial University, takes them far away from Tokyo—and far back from the present day as well.
Yukawa, aka Detective Galileo, has come to the Green Rock Inn, in the little resort town of Hari Cove, to participate in a discussion of proposed undersea mining. Everyone involved agrees that Hari Cove is in danger, but some see the enemy as potential environmental disaster, while others, alarmed by the town’s steep decline from its heyday, see the project as a potential economic savior. The morning after the conference, the body of Masatsugu Tsukahara, another guest of the inn, is discovered at the bottom of a sea cliff. The local police are eager to close the case as an accident, but the discovery that Tsukahara was retired from Tokyo homicide brings his former colleagues into the case, and they soon discover that he was already dead from carbon monoxide poisoning when he fell, or more likely was tossed, from the cliff. Further inquiries reveal that Tsukahara came to Hari Cove not for the mining conference but to seek out Hidetoshi Senba, a man he’d arrested 16 years earlier for the murder of an unemployed nightclub hostess. Kusanagi can’t help thinking that his path would be a lot smoother if only he could locate the missing ex-convict himself or if he could at least figure out what business Tsukahara had with him. Yukawa, for his part, seems interested mainly in constructing experiments designed to teach elementary concepts in physics to Kyohei, the fifth-grader whose parents have sent him to Hari Cove to stay with his uncle, Green Rock Innkeeper Shigehiro Kawahata, his aunt Setsuko, and his cousin Narumi. But it’s Yukawa, as usual (Salvation of a Saint, 2012, etc.), who’ll carry off the sleuthing honors.
Less playful and more labored than its predecessors but just as ingenious in working one twist after another in a case that seems absolutely twist-proof.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-02792-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
