A thousand thrills, a dozen hairpin turns, more overripe suspects than you can shake a warrant at and a near-total lack of...
Though Carolyn Sullivan has been promoted to division manager of the Ventura County Probation Department and is about to marry Mr. Right, her woes continue when a top investigator is killed.
Veronica Campbell is on the skids. Painfully aware that her husband Drew no longer loves her and strung out by the impossible demands of her depressing caseload and her four children, she’s been fabricating interviews she should be taping and basing her recommendations on hunches instead of evidence. But all that ends the day she’s shot to death at the Motor Inn. Veronica was certainly depressed enough to have taken her own life. But Carolyn (Sullivan’s Justice, 2005, etc.) is convinced her old friend was killed by person or persons unknown—a belief that’s bolstered by a series of shocking revelations by Veronica’s hell-raising daughter Jude. A drug-using high-school dropout who was twice pregnant before she turned 18, Jude sends the investigation into a startling new direction by a fusillade of accusations directed variously against her father and her sometime boyfriend, Reggie Stockton. The trouble with Jude’s stories is that she changes them constantly. No sooner has Carolyn, who’s taken the potty-mouthed waif into her home, hauled her into a deposition than Jude recants her accusations and disappears with the court reporter’s credit card. And Reggie, it turns out, is just as slippery, changing his autobiography to suit the weather. Two more murders will turn up the temperature but do nothing to clarify the mystery, which just keeps getting muddier and muddier. The only thing that’s clear is that Carolyn’s imminent marriage to millionaire computer consultant Marcus Wright is unlikely to go off as planned.
A thousand thrills, a dozen hairpin turns, more overripe suspects than you can shake a warrant at and a near-total lack of coherence once the dust has cleared.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7582-1303-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
