Readers will eagerly follow the reckless, entertaining protagonist as he navigates LA and Vegas in this sinuous mystery.
In the author’s debut thriller, a man’s Los Angeles vacation takes unexpected turns when he realizes that the cousin he’s come to visit has gone missing.
Jake Wood’s LA excursion from Iowa to see his cousin Jana begins smashingly when he meets Jana’s parts-model (mostly hands) friend, Laurie. But when attempts to contact Jana result in a few vague text messages, Jake and Laurie go looking for her, suspecting something’s wrong when Jana’s employer, scientist Dr. Gregory Mirek, doesn’t seem to have an office in Los Angeles. Soon the couple is submerged in deception, blackmail and very possibly murder. Kolinski’s novel has a strange but fascinating structure: A romantic relationship between two lead characters starts before the mystery begins. This fits the storyline—the two initially believe that Jana is too busy with her job to respond to emails or texts—but it also makes sense when Jake and Laurie eventually travel together, even hopping a plane to Las Vegas. Jake is a complex protagonist, all too happy to escape Iowa, where he was the sole survivor of a workplace killing spree and suspected by an overzealous detective. And he can deliver understated one-liners: In one of the story’s best scenes, he and Laurie troll a college campus for Dr. Mirek’s research team, and seeing a group photo, Jake drolly asks, “Which one of these guys looks disgruntled to you?” The plot includes accusations of animal abuse—the doc’s field is primatology—and unflinching descriptions may scare off some animal lovers, but Kolinski doesn’t dwell on the imagery or exploit it for shock value. It’s simply another murky element of the couple’s descent into a seedy world, in the same way that Vegas is cast in a less-than-glamorous light with smoke-laden, tattered casinos. The mystery hints at future events, including an early indication of Jana’s whereabouts, and doesn’t deliver easy answers; most of the plot unfolds via Jake’s and Laurie’s theories, which are on the mark only some of the time.
Readers will eagerly follow the reckless, entertaining protagonist as he navigates LA and Vegas in this sinuous mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478390084
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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