As Talley’s 15th cozy reminds us once more, you can’t take her genial heroine (Daughter of Ashes, 2015, etc.) anywhere...
A West Coast convention for Bigfoot believers takes a hairy turn.
After happily meeting up with her former roommate Susan Lockley at their 40th college reunion at Oberlin in Ohio, Hannah Ives takes a slight detour on her return trip home to Annapolis—all the way to the Flat Rock Mountain Lodge in Oregon, venue of the Sasquatch Sesquicentennial. Susan, the event’s organizer, suddenly needs an assistant, and she taps Hannah. Perhaps the distance from her husband, who’s somewhere in the Atlantic on a naval training cruise, makes Hannah more susceptible than usual to one of the conventioneers, handsome ex-detective Jake Cummings, who’s attending with his retired K-9 partner. Jake is a Squatcher who works with the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. To anyone less charming, Hannah might not restrain her skepticism. Far less polite is Martin Radcliffe, a professional debunker. At his opening-night session, he insults Jim Davis, who’s set up a 360-degree motion-activated video camera near the lodge to track Bigfoot. The next day, a lecture on Bigfoot scat is interrupted when something activates Davis’ camera. The live feed shows a huge apelike creature and a bludgeoned body wearing Radcliffe’s trademark lime-green sneakers. Hannah not only helps Susan keep the conference on track, but also works with Jake and the local sheriff to sort out the suspects, including Davis and four other attendees whom Radcliffe publicly humiliated: the scatologist, the author of the definitive book on Bigfoot, a Sasquatch hunter hoping to find Bigfoot living in lava caves, and the Native American who found the caves by pendulum divination. But are Hannah and Jake looking in the right direction? Could the killer have something else to gain from Radcliffe’s death? Or could it actually have been a Bigfoot wielding a very large stick?
As Talley’s 15th cozy reminds us once more, you can’t take her genial heroine (Daughter of Ashes, 2015, etc.) anywhere without her stumbling into a different form of homicide.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8646-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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