The subtlety of this seventh Timber Creek K-9 mystery suggests the best of Scandinavian noir, with a nod to animal lovers.
A veteran K-9 cop hunts a serial killer in the rugged mountains of Colorado.
The unsolved murder of her father, Douglas Wray, has haunted Deputy Mattie Cobb for decades. San Diego cold case detective Jim Hauck, who’s been investigating the crime, meets her and her K-9 partner, Robo, at a Colorado prison to question inmate John Cobb, a prime suspect as well as a villain so prominent in Mattie’s early life that, until recently, she'd thought he was her uncle. Cole Parker, Mattie’s veterinarian boyfriend, can’t be on hand to lend his support because he’s back home in Timber Creek delivering Sassy’s German shepherd puppies, sired by Robo. The delivery goes well; Mattie’s visit, not so much. Cobb’s been found dead in his cell, leaving behind a book with dog-eared pages as well as maps with markings. The sweeter happenings at Cole’s clinic play out in counterpoint to Mattie's quest; Hauck suspects there’s a link between Cobb’s death and that of Mattie’s father, and Mattie sees the things Cobb has left behind as so many potential clues. While exploring a cave that Cobb’s map led her to, Mattie gets a call about the discovery of a body nearby. Mizushima’s subdued voice perfectly matches her heroine’s methodical, unruffled approach, building suspense as it presents the complex backstory with clarity. Forensics and the wilderness setting figure prominently in the probe. The identity of the victim will surprise many readers as the determined sleuth chases someone now identified as a serial killer.
The subtlety of this seventh Timber Creek K-9 mystery suggests the best of Scandinavian noir, with a nod to animal lovers.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64385-746-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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