Far too many characters and a large school of red herrings impede the flow, but snarky repartee, and the continuing conceit...
Second installment in the adventures of freelance baker and reluctant sleuth Teeny Templeton.
Now comfortably ensconced at her late Aunt Bluette’s Georgia peach farm, which she’s been able to save thanks to a windfall inheritance from her now-deceased ex-fiancé, Teeny is finding that her tiny hometown of Bonaventure is a hotbed not only of petty gossip but murderous machinations. When Teeny inadvertently witnesses the strangulation of her high school nemesis Barb at the hands of a lanky stranger in a Bill Clinton mask, her current fiancé (and Barb’s former lover) Coop, a lawyer, advises Teeny to lay low. In the first installment (Gone with a Handsomer Man, 2011), incredibly precocious 10-year-old Emerson, Barb’s daughter, showed up on Coop’s doorstep to claim he is her real father, not creepy pharmacist Lester, whom Barb married on the rebound from Coop. Lester, only too eager to disown Emerson, demands a DNA test. As Teeny investigates Barb's death, aided by a trail of cryptic clues Barb planted, she encounters a cast of characters and potential villains straight out of Southern Novel central casting: at least two foulmouthed, hard-drinking old ladies, two middle-aged former cotillion debutantes who still see Teeny as trash, and diverse exemplars of Southern manhood. Teeny rebuffs every effort of laconic and lean Red, Coop’s private eye, to keep her out of trouble. Son, now a successful plastic surgeon, once almost supplanted Coop in Teeny’s heart. Then there is repellant lothario Josh, who runs Bonaventure’s mortuary, and Norris, Lester’s equally creepy brother whose medical license has been yanked for sexual assault. A number of healthy people, many of them Son’s patients, have been dying of mysterious causes after hospitalizations for minor injuries or elective surgery: Could Barb’s anagrams, decoded by Emerson, indicate that Bonaventure’s newest industry is organ trafficking?
Far too many characters and a large school of red herrings impede the flow, but snarky repartee, and the continuing conceit of Teeny’s recipes for disaster, keep the comedy afloat.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57123-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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