The husband-and-wife authors (The Plague of Thieves Affair, 2016, etc.) manage the double plot with professional dexterity....
The intrepid partners in Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, land a pair of cases that both begin with adulterous affairs but take them in very different directions.
One of the rights San Francisco suffragette Amity Wellman evidently claims for women is the right to conduct sexual affairs without fear of the consequences. Her error is revealed by a series of anonymous letters warning of righteous retribution and the shot someone takes at her from outside her house—a shot that persuades her new friend Sabina Carpenter to investigate the source of the threats (Amity’s slimy lover, tea importer Fenton Egan? his formidable wife, Prudence? Nathaniel Dobbs, head of the anti-suffragist Solidarity Party? any of the hundreds of the city’s other anti-feminist activists?). John Quincannon, meantime, has a new client of his own: Woolworth National Bank president Titus Wrixton, whose own amours, duly documented by his letters, have already cost him $5,000 paid to a blackmailer who’s now come back for a second helping. Quincannon arranges to observe the transfer of the second installment and follows the man who’s taken the valise full of cash all the way to Gunpowder Alley, where someone shoots him dead inside a bolted room inside a bolted apartment. It doesn’t help a bit to identify the victim as tobacconist Raymond Sonderberg; what’s important is that the valise has vanished, along with Titus Wrixton’s hope of untroubled days.
The husband-and-wife authors (The Plague of Thieves Affair, 2016, etc.) manage the double plot with professional dexterity. Sadly, though, each of the separate cases peaks around the halfway point before ingenuity and interest fade. And shouldn’t the title really be The Dangerous Ladies Affairs?Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8105-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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