How many sorrows can a franchise hero be put through? Oldham continues to push the envelope.
Even though he’s retired from the Lancashire Constabulary, Henry Christie continues his quest to prove that English villages are the most dangerous places on Earth and the most traumatic for himself.
When 13-year-old Charlotte Kirkham vanishes from under her mother’s and stepfather’s noses at the Kendleton Country Fair, Henry, noting Melinda West’s maternal distress, offers to help rouse the troops for a search. Along the way, something about Leonard Lennox, who runs a burger van, strikes him as familiar, and no wonder: Twelve years ago, Henry’s testimony had put Lennox away for kidnapping an 8-year-old girl. It hardly matters that the abductor this time is Lennox’s son, Ernest, because the pressure Henry puts on the elder Lennox brings the man’s long-festering desire for revenge to the boiling point. While DS Debbie Blackstone and her team are still looking for Charlotte, Lennox and his mates—Ernest; catalytic converter thieves Benny and Jimbo; and sadistic pickpocket Cinderella Watkinson—launch a furious round of violent crimes. Their home invasion of wealthy county fair supporter Maude Crichton nets them thousands in cash and jewelry and Maude’s beloved bichon frisé. Moving on to the home of fair organizer Veronica Gough, they demand the proceeds from the event, which she’s placed in Henry’s hands. So they target The Tawny Owl, the pub Henry owns with Ginny Holt, the stepdaughter of his lost love, Alison, who's just told Henry that she and her fiance, Fred Livingston, are going to have a baby. The only weak link in this volley of fireworks is the extended epilogue, three months later, when Henry’s finally in a position to take his own revenge.
How many sorrows can a franchise hero be put through? Oldham continues to push the envelope.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781448306954
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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