Sennefelder takes a well-worn formula and pushes it to the edge. Readers may well be tempted to side with the police in...
A food blogger investigates her neighbor’s death.
One brush with death apparently isn’t enough for Hope Early, who moved back to her hometown hoping to recover from a brutal stint on The Sweet Taste of Success, a reality cooking show that led to the spectacular and very public breakup of her marriage. But life in rural Connecticut hasn’t proved all that restorative. Shortly after her arrival in Jefferson, her sister, Claire Dixon, needed Hope’s help clearing her of the murder of a rival realtor (The Uninvited Corpse, 2018), a favor that left Hope facing down a killer. Now, Hope’s neighbor Peggy Olson is burned to death in a fire, a blaze that would have been mistaken for a stovetop accident triggered by the elderly woman’s failing memory if not for the discovery of a second body in the house. And although Hope has reluctantly agreed to contribute to a forthcoming cookbook based on Sweet Taste, she can’t concentrate on her cookies when there’s a killer lurking nearby and the police seem stumped. Her mode of investigation is a little more direct than that of most other small-town amateurs. Instead of quietly nosing around and asking nondirective questions, she confronts many of Jefferson’s leading citizens, asking them straight up if there’s any reason they might want Planning and Zoning Commission member Lily Barnhart, Peggy’s co-corpse, dead. So it’s hardly a surprise when she comes home one day to find a threatening note nailed to her beautifully refinished door. But the hole that defaces her hardwood may be the least of Hope’s problems as she continues to defy the pleas of the local police to leave the investigation to the professionals.
Sennefelder takes a well-worn formula and pushes it to the edge. Readers may well be tempted to side with the police in their assessment of the heroine’s detective prowess.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1593-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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