Mysterious disappearances, danger, and death converge against the exotic backdrop of post–Khmer Rouge Cambodia in Medina’s debut effort.
Medina, a former member of the British armed forces, takes her alter ego, Tess Hardy, to the jungles of Cambodia, where impoverished villagers live in fear of a killer they call the White Crocodile. Tess has enlisted with the MCT, a charitable mine-clearing agency that rids the fields of some of the thousands of mines left behind by the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered countless Cambodians. But Tess didn’t really go to Cambodia to clear mines: she came to find out what happened to her former husband, Luke. Cruel and abusive during their marriage, Luke left a cryptic message for Tess before his death, and although she was relieved to be out of the marriage, she still wants to know the truth about him. When Johnny, another mine cleaner, is badly injured in an explosion, Tess goes back to the field and finds a second, more deadly mine had also been planted. Even though it failed to explode, she realizes that someone or something is murdering both villagers and mine clearners. Meanwhile, in Manchester, England, two detectives—Wessex and Viles—are probing the death of a young woman whose body was found in the woods. The book takes place over eight consecutive days, and Medina weaves together the two different, but interconnected, stories. The book’s real plus is the peek it allows into a world few Westerners see: the ravaged society the Khmer Rouge left behind in Cambodia, with rampant poverty and hunger, as well as the dangerous, deadly job assigned to mine cleaners. Medina struggles the most in the book’s beginning and end. The story’s early pages are confusing, as if it took time for the author to gain traction, while the final pages suffer from the opposite problem and come off a bit rushed.
A heart-rending look at a culture decimated by the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-37400-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
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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. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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