by Kenneth J. Harvey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2007
This moody, brooding portrait will leave readers chilled and profoundly moved.
Even after the prison doors have opened, family cycles of violence and revenge can keep a man in chains.
In this tense and unrelenting first-person narrative, Canadian author Harvey (The Town That Forgot How to Breath, 2005, etc.) gives us Myrden (no first name) just as he is released from prison after serving 14 years for murder. DNA evidence has overturned his conviction, but the world he returns to regards him alternately as a martyr “innocent as a lamb” and as a killer who got out on a technicality. Myrden himself cannot share the truth of the crime, which he remembers only as part of a drunken spree. Signs point to one of his younger cronies, Willis, who now denies he was there the night Myrden’s girlfriend, Doreen Stagg, was killed. But violence and sexual jealousy run through Myrden’s crew like booze. His best pal Randy puts two men in a coma with his fists. His son Bobby has already been in and out of jail before meeting a violent end, and Myrden himself wakes up from his own welcome-home party to find “knuckles covered in dark, dried blood. Stains and fresh scabs.” Only by deduction does he piece together his beating of his wife’s new boyfriend during the previous night’s alcoholic blackout. Slowly re-entering the free world, Myrden finds reason to continue through his love for his granddaughter Caroline and a wounded former girlfriend, Ruth. When the settlement for his wrongful imprisonment comes through, Myrden glimpses a better possible future, particularly for his daughter Jackie and for granddaughter Caroline: “Buy them better lives.” He even takes a vacation with Ruth, who shows him how life could be. But when Myrden and Ruth return, the doting family man finds himself drawn back in by violence to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that Harvey has hinted at with chilling precision.
This moody, brooding portrait will leave readers chilled and profoundly moved.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101483-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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 Kathy Reichs
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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