A recent widow confronts her demons and a whole lot more during a trip to the Michigan wilderness.
Eden Wallace has always been afraid of the dark, but that didn’t stop her husband, Army veteran Bix Wallace, from booking a cabin in Michigan’s Straits Point International Dark Sky Park to mark their 10th anniversary. Ironically, Bix misses the celebration when his drunken driving ends his life, along with those of four others, nine months before the big day; it’s not till after his death that Eden even learns of the reservation. Even worse, when she arrives at Dark Sky Park, she realizes that Bix, whether deliberately or not, didn’t book the whole cabin, only a suite in a building she’ll be sharing with five college chums and the new girlfriend of one of them. Dev, Paris, Sam, and Martha all make it clear that they’d love to see Eden leave. Only Malloy and Hillary, his new girlfriend, make any gestures of friendship, and those are cut in half when Eden’s awakened by a scream that pulls her to the kitchen, where Malloy is lying dead, a screwdriver in his neck. Since there’s no chance that his demise was accidental, his old buddies instantly fall to accusing each other as well as Hillary and Eden, the newcomers who’ve crashed their circle. The questions posed by Park Director Warren Hoyt, Emmet County Sheriff Jeffrey Barrows, and Officer Bridget Cooley will all play a role in determining whodunit, but not before another participant in the reunion takes a header down the stairs, still another is poisoned, and Eden, still grieving the death of her husband, realizes that she has a previous connection to the group she’s been thrown into that’s both unwelcome and ugly.
Rader-Day (The Day I Died, 2017, etc.) juices her young-widow setup with enough soul-searching, menace, and dirty linen to make you think of Mary Higgins Clark with teeth bared.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-256030-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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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One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
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Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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