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
Share your opinion of this book
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by C.J. Box
BOOK REVIEW
by C.J. Box
BOOK REVIEW
by C.J. Box
BOOK REVIEW
by C.J. Box
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
29
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.