Daheim’s series—like Alpine, the kind of town that considers you a newcomer if you’ve only lived there 10 years—bustles with...
Why would a man confess to a murder if he didn’t commit it?
Larry Peterson dies of a heart attack after spending 10 years in prison for strangling his sister Linda, apparently jealous that she was to be named the next bank president when their dad died. But just as Larry shuffles off this mortal coil, Sheriff Milo Dodge receives anonymous letters threatening mayhem unless he proves that Larry didn’t do it. Then Emma Lord, publisher of the Alpine Advocate (The Alpine Uproar, 2009, etc.) is sent a similar letter. Retracing the original story with input from Vida Runkel, the House & Home editor who knows everybody in town going back several generations, Emma keeps circling around the attack on reclusive artist Craig Laurentis, hospitalized after being shot in the woods, perhaps by maple-tree poachers (don’t ask). If his most recent painting, a dour departure from his former style, holds a clue, Emma can’t fathom it. Besides, she must deal with Denise, Larry’s dimwitted daughter, who’s currently temping at the Advocate, where she wants to bring her ex’s dog to work; Denise’s brothers, in town for their dad’s funeral and their mother’s unexpected suicide; and a ghastly hostage takeover that endangers Milo and his daughter. By the time facts, fallacies and half-truths have been sorted out, there will be two dead, two wounded and a bail-jumping poacher with an unspeakable secret.
Daheim’s series—like Alpine, the kind of town that considers you a newcomer if you’ve only lived there 10 years—bustles with small-town charm and convoluted family relationships.Pub Date: March 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-50257-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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