In her second outing, Cash Blackbear goes off to college and finds herself embroiled in the mystery of a missing classmate.
“I’m not used to folks treating me like I’m stupid,” says Cash. But Moorhead State is another world, one slow to disclose the secrets of its initiated. When Cash (Murder on the Red River, 2017) attends a meeting called by the guidance counselor, Mrs. Kills Horses, to launch a new college chapter of the Indian Studies Association, the other students who turn out seem to be on another planet. When she wants to test out of her entry-level English class because the simple assignments bore her, professor LeRoy, the department chair, acts as if she can’t be serious. The activities most congenial to her—picking farmer Milt’s sugar beets and loading them on a truck, shooting pool at Shorty Nelson’s bar, drinking beer with her married ex-lover, Jim Jenson, smoking a million cigarettes—are all things she did long before she arrived at Moorhead State. Not even the request by Sheriff Dave Wheaton, who plucked the 3-year-old Cash from the wreck that killed her mother, to speak with the parents of vanished classmate Janet Tweed seems to lead anywhere. Only the unheralded return of Mo, the brother she’d long since forgotten, from his stint as an Army medic to Cash’s place, where he promptly installs himself, awakens much of a response, and it’s one that’s not entirely positive. Nothing will get Cash’s engines revving, it seems, but being snatched and imprisoned along with Janet and half a dozen other cheerleader types. Unfurling her secret weapons—the ability to take a beating and a dead-eyed determination to be accountable to no one but herself—she methodically plans an escape that will be capped by Mo’s remark: “What’d I tell you? White slavery.”
The furious intensity of the heroine’s simmering energy overshadows most of the cast. It’s a particularly nice touch, though, that the kidnapper, once identified, is never seen again, vanishing as completely as last week’s trash.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947627-11-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
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BOOK REVIEW
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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