Though sometimes there’s so much going on that you lose sight of the high-stakes main event, Garrett continues to build an...
An oddly assembled crew digs into the depths of Hollywood’s elite in an effort to solve crimes for cash.
Still savoring the sweet taste of success from her last case, which netted her $1,000 (Hollywood Homicide, 2018), Dayna Anderson’s ready to continue her crime-solving streak. Or, at the very least, her money-earning streak, which is especially welcome since she hasn’t worked as an actress since her Chubby’s Chicken commercial almost two years ago. Dayna’s near-accidental path as an amateur detective and bounty hunter for the LAPD tip line is bolstered by her friendship with uncharismatic, unromantic Aubrey S. Adams-Parker, an ex-cop who backs up Dayna’s Hollywood hunches with law and order. The real fun begins when Dayna teams up with her friends as sidekicks. Sienna’s determined to make it as an Instagram star; Emme’s a computer whiz with maybe too much time on her hands. Dayna’s latest case is the fatal shooting of Lyla Davis, a publicist for the Silver Sphere Organization. While Lyla’s death looks like collateral damage in an ATM holdup, Dayna’s savvy and digging suggest that someone could have wanted to keep a secret Lyla was in on. Dayna knows Hollywood secrets all too well. After all, she’s been living one ever since she hooked up with childhood friend Omari Grant, whose publicist doesn’t want it getting around that Omari’s with some average girl. But Dayna’s sleuthing and ad hoc team make her anything but average, and she cuts to the truth around Lyla’s death quickly but without thinking about the ramifications that secrets kill.
Though sometimes there’s so much going on that you lose sight of the high-stakes main event, Garrett continues to build an appealingly quirky crime-solving team.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5297-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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