Just a few critical degrees hotter than tepid, and the sex is offstage. Safe thrills for the easily shocked.
A horse is hijacked and held for ransom and a reporter is hired to get to the bottom of things, as the race to supplant Dick Francis continues.
Handsome, early-’30s, bachelor Ben Copperfield (Deadfall, Mar. 2005, etc.) makes enough of a living as a freelance reporter to rent a pleasant cottage with all the mod cons, keep up a big SUV and carry on a romance with lovely live-in girlfriend Lisa, a tour guide for rich Americans. Ben’s specialty as a writer is the horse world. He was practically born on a horse. Mom and Dad, now divorced, are horse people, and half-brother Mikey seems to have a future as a jockey. One of the mysteries in this not particularly challenging turf-thriller is Ben’s borderline phobic aversion to horses. It’s a neurosis that will plague him from the moment young Mikey calls to say that he’s been innocently but alarmingly involved in the kidnapping of Cajun King, favorite for upcoming premier steeplechase event, the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The missing horse is owned by exceptionally unpleasant trainer, the nouveau riche Eddie Truman, a man with an unsavory past and a disastrously dysfunctional family. Truman hires Ben to investigate the crime while keeping it out of the news, a task that must be juggled with Ben’s earlier assignment to cover the British debut of a Hungarian equine circus whose riders he has come to admire. Flirting with Truman’s younger daughter Fliss, dodging glowers from older daughter Helen, whose husband is nearly as nasty as Truman, exchanging blows with rabid animal activists, and missing assignations with Lisa, Ben finds that his two writing assignments seem to be moving towards a merger. He further finds it necessary to confront his fears and, with the help of the Hungarians, get himself back on a horse.
Just a few critical degrees hotter than tepid, and the sex is offstage. Safe thrills for the easily shocked.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-09-180027-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hutchinson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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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