Soule takes a break from her P.J. Benson series (Eat Crow and Die, 2015, etc.) for a hair-raising thriller that breaks no...
An Alaska cop whose past is shrouded in secrecy must deal with a crime that revives all her horrifying memories.
Officer Katherine Ward of the Skagway Police Department lives with her grandfather, whose Alzheimer's is progressing swiftly. Only the police chief, who’s on medical leave, knows that Katherine was once kidnapped, raped, and tortured by The Beekeeper, a sociopath who murdered her entire family. No one in the small department is much excited by Crystal Morgan’s claim that Misty, her 16-year-old stepdaughter, has been kidnapped. The two were supposedly bonding on a cruise while Crystal’s wealthy husband, Tom, is half a world away on business. With the chief out and, more importantly, another member of the department vanishing while on a fishing trip, Katherine gets the case, which soon produces some very bad vibes. Meantime, computer expert Vince Nanini, a fixer for Tom, has alerted the Canadian border patrol to look for Misty, whose computer indicates she had made arrangements to meet a young man and take off on a tour of Canada. Vince, a Vin Diesel look-alike, is not impressed with the search effort but pushes Katherine to let him travel with her. The vanishing of Sarah Wilson, the girl Katherine hired to cook dinner for her grandfather, brings back bad memories that are fanned into flame when she learns that The Beekeeper has been released from a Michigan mental institution. Kicked off the case when the department learns of the connection, she’s forced to depend on Vince in her continued search for the two missing girls, who she fears are experiencing exactly what she had years before.
Soule takes a break from her P.J. Benson series (Eat Crow and Die, 2015, etc.) for a hair-raising thriller that breaks no new ground but has all the excitement it needs to keep you reading.Pub Date: March 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4328-3281-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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
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