An excellent police procedural and more. In his fourth outing (The Last Witness, 2003, etc.), Mars becomes the central...
A case that’s ice cold when Detective Marshall Bahr takes it on suddenly turns murderously hot.
Mars “the Candy Man” Bahr has been reassigned. He and Nettie Frisch, his beautiful young partner, have moved over from Minneapolis PD to Minnesota’s Cold Case Unit, and Mars is fretting. He misses the rush of a big city homicide department. Though he doesn’t miss the politics, even backstabbing takes on a nostalgic hue as the unproductive days pile up. In near desperation, he drives four hours to the town of Redstone to talk to retired Chief of Police Sigvald Sampson about the night Andrea Bergstad, 17, disappeared. It’s a case Sig Sampson has never forgiven himself for not cracking. Clues were scant, Mars points out: a pair of elusive witnesses, an abruptly terminated phone call. There wasn’t much to go on then, and there’s even less now, almost two decades later. Then, unexpectedly, there’s a break in the case when a TV broadcast forces a Vietnam veteran to remember something he doesn’t want to. Now there are connections to be made, and Mars and Nettie set about making them in ways that scare the daylights out of both. Powerful men are involved, men with secrets who’ll stop at nothing to keep them buried.
An excellent police procedural and more. In his fourth outing (The Last Witness, 2003, etc.), Mars becomes the central figure in a tense, suspenseful, even poignant human drama.Pub Date: July 30, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31471-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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