Weiss’ many quirky ongoing characters add charm and humor, but this time the plot rambles more than a little.
A yearly battle to preserve a California town’s Christmas Cow turns deadly.
The town of San Benedetto has two major business enterprises, vineyards and dairy farms. Every year the Dairy Association builds a large straw cow to celebrate Christmas, and every year pranksters try to destroy it. Maddie Kosloski’s mother is on guard at the site when the cow is attacked by Santa Claus and four gingerbread men, each armed with flaming arrows. In the process, Bill Eldrich, the other guard, is killed. Maddie (Pressed to Death, 2017, etc.) arrives at the site with Detective Jason Slate, a cop with whom she has a good relationship bordering on romance. His partner, Detective Laurel Hammer, on the other hand, has had it in for Maddie ever since Maddie accidentally set Laurel’s hair on fire. The Paranormal Museum Maddie owns has been doing a booming business ever since she added the haunted cowbells that years before had been sent to the Dairy Association from Switzerland. Every member of the original dairy board died within a year of the bells’ arrival. Even though most of them were well up in years, the bells have acquired a reputation that’s enhanced by Eldrich’s death, since he had apparently been hearing cowbells in the days before his death. Maddie’s mom, who has fingers in every pie in town, insists that they investigate even after they narrowly escape death when her car is blown up in the driveway of a married pair of dairy farmers they’re questioning. A ceremony to prevent more deaths by putting a spell on the bells only makes things worse when observers complain something bit them. And the list of possible killers expands as Maddie discovers that Bill, who was quite the lady’s man, had a lot more enemies than it first appeared. Despite warnings from Jason and threats from Hammer, Maddie can’t stop the sleuthing that makes her a target for a ruthless killer.
Weiss’ many quirky ongoing characters add charm and humor, but this time the plot rambles more than a little.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5036-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
