Mas' fifth case (Blood Hina, 2010, etc.) has both depth and an intricate whodunit, weaving flashbacks of the sleuth's...
Family turmoil draws an elderly part-time California sleuth back into action and triggers a sometimes-uncomfortable trip down Memory Lane.
The Watsonville funeral of his second cousin Shug becomes a bittersweet reunion for elderly Mas Arai and a handful of others who worked the strawberry fields together decades ago. The retired gardener and occasional detective feels affection for his 1940s youth in Watsonville but also remembers the discrimination he faced after emigrating to the United States in the wake of Hiroshima. Shug's erratic son Billy has carried on the family strawberry business and even found a remedy for the pernicious plant disease strawberry yellow. His grief is palpable and hard for Mas to witness. In the middle of the night, Mas is jolted by police sirens. The body of a young woman has been found in the nearby greenhouse, her head bashed in. She's identified as Laila Smith, Billy's girlfriend. That's awkward because Billy is married, though estranged from his wife. One of the investigating detectives is Shug's niece Robin Arai, who's not shy about sharing information with Mas. Overwhelmed, he decides to leave, but Shug's widow, Minnie, buttonholes him and voices her opinion that Shug was murdered, not the victim of the reported heart attack. What can Mas do but probe?
Mas' fifth case (Blood Hina, 2010, etc.) has both depth and an intricate whodunit, weaving flashbacks of the sleuth's complicated youth with the starker contemporary reality of buried resentments and revenge.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938849-02-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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