The possible dognapping of a pooch that belonged to her brother’s new girlfriend puts a dog lover on watch and maybe in danger herself.
Though her brother Neal has never been short on love interests, Carrie Kennersly is intrigued that he appears to be smitten once more. Janelle Blaystone, the young woman who’s caught Neal’s eye, is a newcomer to Knobcone Heights. Although Janelle seems friendly enough, Carrie thinks she sees sadness in her eyes. Her assessment is confirmed when Janelle reveals that one of her primary reasons for coming to town is to get away from reminders of the disappearance of Go, her dog. Later, however, Janelle shows a strong interest in the upscale area of Knobcone Heights and houses like the one belonging to the Arnist family. When Carrie follows up with Janelle, she learns that Go’s disappearance may have been a dognapping and that Janelle believes the perp is Ada Arnist. Carrie, who can’t imagine losing her beloved Biscuit, is eager to help. At the same time, she wants to determine whether Janelle is worth Neal’s attentions. In between indulging these impulses, she must contend with romantic overtures directed toward her by everyone from veterinarian Reed Storme, who’s practically her boyfriend, to, well, most of the other males who pass through town. More sensitive readers are warned that the interesting tidbits Carrie throws off about other characters often come off as judgmental rather than witty or informative.
No serious departures here from Johnston’s series debut (Bite the Biscuit, 2015) or oeuvre (the more recent Knock on Wood, 2015).Pub Date: May 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7387-4627-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | COZY MYSTERY
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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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Smashingly suspenseful fifth in Child’s series (Running Blind, 2000, etc.) lands this British author’s rootless, laconic action hero in southwest Texas, where a femme fatale lures him into a family squabble that inevitably turns violent.
In the kind of daylight-noir setting that Jim Thompson loved, ex-military cop Jack Reacher has his thumb out on a lonely west Texas highway when he’s picked up by Carmine Greer, the Mexican-American wife of bad-ol’-boy Sloop Greer. It seems that Sloop, elder son of a white-trash-turned-oil-rich ranching dynasty, is nearing the end of a prison term for tax evasion, and Carmine, whose body Reacher sees is marked with signs of physical abuse, wants Reacher to be her bodyguard—or, failing that, kill the man in such a way that Carmine can still hold on to her terminally cute six-year-old daughter Ellie. Reacher refuses but decides to meet the folks: Rusty, Sloop’s racist, charmless mother, and Bobby, Sloop’s stupid, pugnacious brother. Meanwhile, a trio of paid assassins is littering the Texas roadside with corpses, starting with Sloop’s lawyer, Al Eugene. In a set-piece as good as anything in Elmore Leonard, Bobby sends two ranch-hands to ambush Reacher at an Abilene roadhouse filled with 20 other cowboys spoiling for a fight. Reacher walks away without a scratch, telling Bobby that his hospitalized ranch-hands have “quit.” Child twists his increasingly hokey plot into a pretzel when Sloop is found dead and Carmine confesses to killing him. Reacher just can’t believe that Carmine is guilty and teams up with Alice Aarons, a leggy Jewish lesbian fresh out of law school, who trusts him with her car, her handgun, and her life.
Child builds tension to unbearable extremes, then blows it out in sharply choreographed violence, even if his plot has more holes in it than the shirt Reacher uses for target practice.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14726-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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