A swift but messy heist tale.
In this debut crime novel, an accountant stages a robbery to pay off a murderous creditor.
Nosebleed-prone accountant Sterling Charles Russell III has just gotten divorced, and he’s having trouble making ends meet now that so much of his paycheck is going toward alimony. This is before he gets a call from his degenerate gambler father, JR, who owes $40,000 to a dangerous loan shark named Ned the Knees. Ned is the primary suspect in the murder of Sterling’s mother a year before—the first victim of JR’s compulsive gambling. Now Sterling has 28 days to come up with the money or his father will join his mother in the afterlife. A visit to a jeweler client in order to pawn a necklace gives Sterling an idea: “Chapman opened the safe door; diamonds, rings, gold and a stack of cash. Receipts on his desk for tens of thousands of dollars from jewelry brokers. Sterling did his books. He never reported any of these commissions. He was loaded.” The accountant puts a devious one-man plan in place that uses his accounting skills as cover for a heist. Unfortunately, Sterling may have left a single drop of blood from his nose at the scene of the crime. And when the police show up at his apartment the next morning, they aren’t just interested in finding the culprit in the jewelry store robbery, but in a murder that took place not long afterward. Cutts’ narrative is fast-paced and high-stakes, pulling readers through complication after complication. Unfortunately, his choppy prose often gets in the way, robbing the novel of some of it potential immersiveness: “The one on the left was a huge man, about 40; receding hair with a ponytail; two or three days of beard growth; arms the size of Sterling’s leg with too many tattoos to count. He was filthy, smelled and had terrible breath! His only words were, ‘you go there,’ pointing to the top bunk on the other side.” Sterling is a sympathetic figure, but the story is so rushed that there is little time for complex characterization or even suspense. It’s a quick read that will keep the audience engaged, but it could have been much more.
A swift but messy heist tale.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6587-3
Page Count: 210
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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