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TOMBSTONE BLUES

Apart from the tin-eared dialogue, relentlessly arch without being funny, Hodgson (The Man Who Killed Shakespeare, 2007,...

Arsenic and Old Lace meets al-Qaida.

Fresh from her divorce to a soulless Houston lawyer and her job at a chain restaurant, Samantha Sterling hopes for new horizons managing the Sunset Bed and Breakfast in Tombstone, Ariz. Both the town and the B&B turn out to be aptly named indeed. As Samantha realizes when the only guest in residence suddenly keels over dead, Sidney Munson and Michael Herod, the 50ish gay couple who own the place together with Sidney’s mother, Esther, are nothing less than an assassination team for The Company. Your tax dollars, funneled through the CIA, send enemies of the American way of life—smugglers, terrorists, attorneys—to the Sunset, where they’re quietly dispatched, preferably by poison, by a crew determined to make initially aghast Samantha one of their number. Nor are Sidney and Michael the only Tombstone residents who nod off every night dreaming of homicide. Tex Birdsong, the retired longshoreman who lives nearby, lives for the date of his shrewish wife Fern’s funeral, and the clueless Tombstone Minutemen plot mayhem at every turn. After two routine rounds of executions, the Sunset circle gets word that an al-Qaida crew has procured a 30-megaton nuclear weapon that it plans to detonate in the area, and matters rapidly descend from the silly to the creepy as Samantha finds herself getting a taste for the work.

Apart from the tin-eared dialogue, relentlessly arch without being funny, Hodgson (The Man Who Killed Shakespeare, 2007, etc.) makes the first half genuinely amusing before those nuclear terrorists arrive and spoil it all.

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4328-2603-1

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage

Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012

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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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