After exploring her heroine’s history in Stalking Ground (2016), Mizushima presents a fresh mystery in which the heroine’s...
A missing girl who turns up dead ignites the protective instincts, if not the soundest investigating instincts, of a cop with a K-9 partner.
When an emergency call from the Timber Creek police force interrupts Deputy Mattie Cobb during a therapy session, she’s all too happy to take the call and get to work. Being on the job with her police dog, Robo, gives Mattie a welcome sense of calm that makes her feel better about her past. Once she hears the details of the case, though, she’s more unsettled than ever. Mattie and Chief Deputy Ken Brody are called to investigate the disappearance of Candace Banks, a junior high school student who didn’t return home at the end of the day. Though Robo is instrumental in finding Candace, the team is too late, for whoever apparently abducted her has killed her. Shocked and horrified, Mattie finds herself talking things over with her friend town vet Cole Walker. Even though Mattie’s taken a step back from her friendship with Cole and his two young daughters, Sophie and Angela, she immediately worries how it will feel for him to hear about the murder of a girl his daughters’ age. Determined to find a suspect, she zeroes in on Gus Tilley, a bachelor from outside town who’s been showing up at Cole’s practice with alarming frequency. Does Gus’ anxious behavior hide a guilty conscience? Mattie feels certain she can find a connection between Gus and Candace’s murder, whether or not her colleagues agree. She becomes even more determined when Sophie goes missing.
After exploring her heroine’s history in Stalking Ground (2016), Mizushima presents a fresh mystery in which the heroine’s motivations may reveal even more about her background.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68331-277-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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