Fans of all things Sherlock-ian will delight in Joanna, so like her father and already training her schoolboy son, Johnny,...
Joanna Watson, the daughter of Sherlock Holmes, continues to pursue the espionage investigations that have recently become her specialty (A Study in Treason, 2018, etc.).
November 1915. Dr. Alexander Verner suddenly appears at 221B Baker St. with a story for the Watson family about how he was taken in a carriage with blacked-out windows to visit a patient whose identity he was not told but who managed to communicate that he was being held captive. After Dr. Verner leaves, Joanna ponders the problem together with her husband, John Jr., and her father-in-law, Holmes amanuensis Dr. John H. Watson, concluding that the unknown man is being held by German agents who may also target Dr. Verner. They arrive at Verner’s door only to find Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard investigating the man's disappearance. Lt. Dunn of Naval Intelligence, called to join the party, reluctantly identifies the mysterious patient as Alistair Ainsworth, a citizen who’s highly prized by German spies. Because Verner’s spilled chloroform on the floor, Toby Two, a hound with an amazingly sensitive nose, can track the odor to a deserted house where they find the body of Dr. Verner, tortured and strangled, but no sign of Ainsworth. Dunn finally acknowledges that the abduction of Ainsworth, one of four people in a top-secret cryptanalysis unit charged with making the British naval codes fail-safe, could spell disaster. Ainsworth’s fellow workers, all brilliant and unorthodox in their methods, are both suspects and sources of help in recovering him before the Germans can break him and get the sensitive information they seek. Using her father’s methods, Joanna leads the search for Ainsworth, who, despite being moved from place to place in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, keeps hiding clues in plain sight for Joanna and her crew to follow.
Fans of all things Sherlock-ian will delight in Joanna, so like her father and already training her schoolboy son, Johnny, in the methods that have solved so many cases like this exceptionally tricky one.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-10108-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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