by Loretta Ross ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2017
Ross’ sleuthing pair (Death and the Brewmaster’s Widow, 2015, etc.) again faces a present-day murder steeped in historical...
An auctioneer tries to help her boyfriend free a fellow veteran suffering from PTSD when he’s accused of murder.
Wren Morgan has finally been able to get into Hadleigh House, a huge old mansion near her Missouri hometown, which is being auctioned off along with its contents and which Wren has been hired to catalog. The death on a nearby trail of a man dressed in an antique Confederate uniform and riding a stolen horse has been written off as a drunken accident. But another fatality has become the concern of Wren’s private-eye boyfriend, Death Bogart, a veteran who suffers from lung problems and PTSD. Death has accepted the pro bono case of Anthony Dozier, another Afghan vet suffering from PTSD, who was found with the body of August Jones, a man he imagined was a fellow soldier he was trying to get to a field hospital. The dead man’s father, Tyler Jones, heads the Church of the Army of Christ, a hate group that persecutes non-Christians. The church demonstrated at the funeral of Dozier’s Muslim wife, and Dozier threatened to kill Jones. Dozier’s lawyer is pursuing an insanity plea, but after Death takes the case at the behest of a group of veterans living next to Hadleigh House, he becomes convinced that Dozier is innocent and sets out to prove it. Wren, meanwhile, finds among the contents of the house a sketchbook containing beautiful preliminary work for the statue of an angel in the nearby cemetery, which turns out to be the scene of August’s stabbing. While Death and his brother, Randy, look for clues in the present, Wren investigates the past even as a killer does everything possible to thwart the investigation.
Ross’ sleuthing pair (Death and the Brewmaster’s Widow, 2015, etc.) again faces a present-day murder steeped in historical detail. The subpar mystery is offset by the ripped-from-the-headlines buzz.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5041-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
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
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