It’s a big jump from needlework to homicide, but Wait combines a plausible plot with the same rockbound coastal atmosphere...
Historic embroidery is a motive for murder in a small Maine town.
Angie Curtis couldn’t get away from her hometown of Haven Harbor fast enough when she was a teenager. Now she’s back, living in the house of the grandmother who raised her while Gram is on her honeymoon. Angie is giving a July Fourth dinner for fellow members of her small business, Mainely Needlepoint, when state trooper Ethan Trask’s younger brother, Rob, arrives with his fiancee, Mary Clough. Mary’s been cleaning out her parents’ house, which has been in the family for generations, and she’s discovered an old panel of embroidery. She and Rob want Angie and the other members of the needlepoint group to estimate its worth so that Rob can sell it to buy his own lobster boat. The panel and the old letter in French accompanying it certainly look antique, and while Angie’s establishing their provenance, she entrusts the panel to Lenore Pendleton, Gram’s lawyer. It seems like a good idea until Lenore is found in her nightgown bludgeoned to death in her own living room. All her jewelry and the embroidery are gone. Even though Ethan doesn’t want Angie to meddle, the 10 years she worked for an Arizona private eye make it impossible for her to walk away. As she pursues the possibility that the panel has connections to both Mary, Queen of Scots, and Marie Antoinette, Angie establishes who knew that the embroidery was with Lenore, and whom Lenore knew well enough to let into her house at night. Then Angie identifies what appears to be a prime suspect, with only one slight complication: the suspect is dead.
It’s a big jump from needlework to homicide, but Wait combines a plausible plot with the same rockbound coastal atmosphere as in Shadows on a Maine Christmas (2014).Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61773-008-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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