A fast-paced and thoroughly engaging whodunit set in the American West.
This latest Jessica James mystery from Oliver (Wolf, 2016, etc.) follows the feisty heroine as she leaves college and returns to her mother’s trailer park in the tiny town of Whitefish, Montana.
In college, Jessica’s adviser was found dead in his bathtub, and she helped to unravel the crime. But as this new novel opens, readers are told that “she much preferred contemplating the mysteries of life to the mysteries of death.” She returns uneasily to the world of her crusty old mother in the Alpine Vista trailer park. As in the previous book, this fish-out-of-water heroine displays a very appealing, mordant wit: “She shuddered, imagining herself in a trailer next door to her mom, married to a beer swilling lumberjack, changing diapers and wiping up baby puke, a stash of Xanax in her nightstand and a bottle of Jack in her pantry to counteract the mind numbing domestic routine.” But any idea of peaceful retreat evaporates almost immediately. Johnny Dickerson perishes in a freak accident at the local mill, and only a week later, Jessica’s cousin Mike likewise dies under mysterious circumstances. Heartbroken, she involves herself in the investigation of these deaths, during which she uncovers nefarious doings involving not only murder, but also human trafficking and shady ecological manipulations by a powerful company and its local representative. Oliver draws all her secondary personae with skill and low-key drama, and the glimpses she gives of life in contemporary Montana—the human tragedies, the tempos, and the raw hopes of those surviving there—remain refreshingly authentic. The character of Jessica is sharpened and augmented from what readers encountered in the first book, and the author’s penchant for perfectly timed punch lines is on full display throughout. As in the first novel in the series, this latest book’s interwoven plots are a bit top-heavy. What this gains in page-turning, the story loses in an element of believability. But Oliver keeps the whole stew bubbling along so effectively that most readers shouldn’t complain.
A fast-paced and thoroughly engaging whodunit set in the American West.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9975836-0-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kaos Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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