A telling epitaph for the dreams of a heroine who had “dared to hope for something else this time.”
Peyton Place meets Fargo in this clipped tale of misdoings in the Red River Valley.
As she’s plowing a field on Bud Borgerud’s farm one morning, Cash Blackbear spots a car parked with its engine running outside a house Borgerud’s renting to Nils and Arlis Petterson. The car is still there and still running the next time Cash passes, and the time after that. So Cash, an Ojibwe woman with a troubled past and a sixth sense that tells her things other people miss, pulls over and checks out the car, which is empty, and the house, which is occupied by a little girl and a dead body. The terrified girl speaks only enough to identify herself as Shawnee, but Cash recognizes the corpse as that of Bud Borgerud. Although Norman County Sheriff David Wheaton, the mentor who’s already gotten Cash out of more than one dangerous situation, assumes that Arlis Petterson shot her landlord and ran off with her husband, Cash can’t imagine why Arlis would abandon a child Cash believes is her daughter, a child who’s now unhappily shifted first to a county social worker’s custody, then to newly widowed Jean Borgerud’s. And the balance of authority shifts from Wheaton to Cash when she rescues him from the trunk of his car, where he’s been locked by a trio of bank robbers who got the drop on him. Rendon is less interested in spinning out further complications—most readers will spot Borgerud’s killer early on—than in exploring the ways the deck is stacked against Cash because she’s a woman, an Ojibwe, and a maverick with limited respect for white men’s rules.
A telling epitaph for the dreams of a heroine who had “dared to hope for something else this time.”Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781641296588
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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