A police officer who grew up Amish struggles to separate her past from the present.
A call about a prison break arouses memories of Painters Mill Police Chief Kate Burkholder’s happy childhood and a keen sense of present danger. Joseph King, who lived next door to Kate when she was growing up, was both her playmate and her first crush. His life and personality changed when his father was killed in an accident and the family moved away. After a checkered career, he married lovely Naomi and they had five children before he was sent to prison for murdering her. While Kate is checking around the house where Naomi’s sister, Rebecca, and her husband, Daniel Beachy, live with Joseph’s children, she’s jumped by someone who turns out to be Joseph, who tells her that he didn’t kill his wife—a story that’s backed up by his youngest daughter, Sadie, who was only 3 at the time. Unlike her colleagues, Kate’s inclined to believe the mature little girl’s story of a stranger who entered the house, killed her mother, and nearly killed Sadie too. After Kate promises Joseph she'll look into his case, he sends her out to talk to the police officers who have surrounded them, but her story and advice are callously dismissed, and Joseph is killed by a police sniper. A picture taken as she left the house that night makes it look as if Joseph was kissing her, causing a media storm that sends the devastated Kate into administrative leave. But her own loyal team and her lover, John Tomasetti, an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, believe in her hunch. As she talks to witnesses and looks through questionable case records, Kate realizes that even her position may not protect her from the consequences of her search.
Castillo (Among the Wicked, 2016, etc.) once again weaves the particularities of the Amish mindset into a complex mystery that will leave you crying with pity or seething with rage.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12128-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
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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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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 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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