Twenty-one stories by the winner of last year's Edgar for Best Novel (A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, 1981), demonstrating his versatility, productiveness, and growth as a writer. Though this is Block's third collection (after Like a Lamb to Slaughter and Sometimes They Bite), focusing on tales written after 1984, it includes four pieces published in the 60's in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Each Hitchcock yarn concerns murder and packs a final twist but no emotional resonance: practice scales, really, played diligently by a writer learning his craft. The later stories show the development of Block's more mature themes. Three series characters appear in them: Bernie Rhodenbarr, a thief who steals nothing of value and is a veteran of five novels (The Burglar Who Liked Mondrian, etc.); Martin H. Ehrengraf, an attorney whose ruthless methods get his clients (accused murderers) off the hook and who appears only in stories; and popular p.i. Matt Scudder. Rhodenbarr's turn, in "The Burglar Who Dropped in on Elvis"—a witty puzzler in which the thief is hired to break into and photograph Elvis's sequestered bedroom at Graceland—highlights Block's lighter vein, which has been drying out lately. The two Ehrengraf stories—which show the lawyer crucifying innocents to defend his clients—demonstrate how Block's earlier irony grew into a sharper mordancy. And the two Scudder tales, as well as several others, reflect his more recent concern with ever-darker subjects. "Answers to Soldier," for instance, tells of a hit man who regularly warms up to his intended victims but inevitably reverts to his cruel ways; and "The Merciful Angel of Death," a powerful exploration of compassion, relates Scudder's tracking of a woman who may be sending AIDS victims to a gentle death. A mixed bag ranging from the hack to the sublime—and, for its best work, a must for Block/Scudder fans.
Pub Date: April 23, 1993
ISBN: 0380715686
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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
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