A sect of religious fanatics imprisons a dozen school-aged hostages in their Texas compoundand Walker gets a chance to show how a tough-minded writer might have turned Waco around. Fade in on Day 46 of the hostage crisis. The 11 kids and bus driver Walter Demming, hidden in an underground bus for over six weeks, are near the breaking point when her editor persuades Lone Star Monthly reporter Molly Cates that her interview two years ago with Samuel Mordecai, self-anointed messiah of the Hearth Nazarenes, gives her the edge on the story of a lifetime. (The editor's obviously forgotten what a bang-up job Molly did in her Edgar-winning The Red Scream last year.) As she runs around interviewing likely contacts with Mordecai, Molly becomes obsessed with locating his birth mother, who abandoned him as an infant; if only she can reunite mother and son, she thinks, she just might provoke a breakthrough in the fruitless hostage negotiations. Molly doesn't know that the FBI isn't getting anywhere with Mordecai because there's no chance of his releasing the children: He plans a millennial sacrifice of innocents on the 50th day of their captivity. Led by burned-out Demming, who tries to rally them by telling an animal fable based on his hitch in Vietnam, the kids listen passively to Mordecai's daily preaching, practice their defensive maneuvers for the day they're sure is coming, and pray that the Hearth Nazarenes will get an all- important inhaler for an asthmatic hostage. Meanwhile, Molly, thrown back together with her hostage negotiator ex-husband and his killer dog, finally tracks down Mordecai's motherbut she's frantically angry and defensive, exactly the last person the authorities want to meet with Mordecai. What now? Nail-biting suspense from the first page, masterfully extended to the last. Check your political sympathies at the door, stock up on your blood-pressure medication, and enjoy. (First printing of 200,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-46859-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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