by Ken Stichter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2018
An unhurried but gripping mystery, despite a few errors.
In Stichter’s (The Water and Murder Flow South, 2016, etc.) latest series thriller, a cold case involving missing high schoolers leads to the discovery of a methodical serial killer.
Investigator Van Vanarsdale has spent the last seven years on an FBI counterterrorism task force. Now back at California’s Orange County Sheriff’s Department, he starts with a few old, unsolved cases. In one, a high school couple, Carlos Fuentes and Cindy Ashae, disappeared near a hiking area after their prom in 1972, with only a burned-out Volkswagen van left behind. Carlos is still missing, but Cindy’s remains later turned up in 1999 in a container buried beneath the school’s time capsule. Previous investigators haven’t made any headway since, but Van’s diligent interviews lead him to a new person of interest: Allison Connors, a former English teacher. She was a noted intellectual and loner who left the school in 1978. Van can’t find a trace of her since her departure, or anything about her before 1963. But her father had a lethal accident in 1966 while hiking on the John Muir Trail, and Van thinks that experienced backpacker Allison could be linked to a number of other nearby disappearances and deaths. However, finding and catching a potential serial killer won’t be easy. Stichter immediately makes readers aware that Allison instigated her father’s accident, but he still delivers a taut mystery. Allison’s back story is otherwise murky, and Van’s investigation unfolds naturally and engagingly, and it takes time before the suspect enters his line of sight. Supporting characters are memorable, even if their primary purpose is simply assisting Van; the best are Sti and Rob, backpacking retirees who help the investigator on the possibly treacherous hiking trail (and who appeared in the author’s previous novels). The geography is fondly detailed throughout with “sporadic rock outcrops” and “intersecting and diverging canyons.” Unfortunately, the story’s timeline has distracting contradictions: victims from 1969, ’76, and ’79 are all later referenced as vanishing or dying in different years.
An unhurried but gripping mystery, despite a few errors.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3050-5
Page Count: 498
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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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