The continuing sleuth easily substitutes for Clark’s interchangeable damsels in distress, and Burke brings a sharp legal eye...
The team behind Clark’s reality TV show Under Suspicion (I’ve Got You Under My Skin, 2014) returns to dramatize—all right, solve—another cold case, with welcome help from co-author Burke (All Day and a Night, 2014, etc.).
Rosemary Dempsey has always hated the references to her daughter, Susan, as Cinderella ever since Susan was found in Laurel Canyon Park the morning after her father’s 60th birthday party, a party she passed up for an audition with indie director Frank Parker. Susan made it to within half a mile of Parker’s home before she was strangled after losing a shoe, presumably in a futile attempt to outrace her killer. Now that producer Laurie Moran and the rest of the Under Suspicion crew wants to film a series of interviews about the 20-year-old murder, Rosemary sees the TV show as an opportunity to restore Susan’s individual identity to the figure of a Cinderella who’d left a shoe behind. Susan’s other intimates aren’t so eager to participate. Parker, coming off an Oscar nomination, doesn’t need the publicity. Susan’s old boyfriend, character actor Keith Ratner, has never been very cooperative. Her former UCLA roommates, Madison Meyer and Nicole Melling, have their own secrets to hide. So does her college friend Dwight Cook, who was vaulted into the ranks of Silicon Valley royalty while he was still sitting in professor Richard Hathaway’s computer science class with Susan. It’s up to Laurie and Alex Buckley, the resident lawyer of Under Suspicion who loves her, to figure out why the necklace Susan was wearing the night she died was so much more important than her shoe.
The continuing sleuth easily substitutes for Clark’s interchangeable damsels in distress, and Burke brings a sharp legal eye to the proceedings. This serendipitous series launch, or continuation, will satisfy Clark’s legion of fans and may well win her some new ones.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6312-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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