The combination of murder, menace, and sexual jealousy provides Hall (Cover Up, 2017, etc.) a combustible mix, but the...
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll threaten the peace on DS Harry Barnard’s Soho beat.
Life was simpler back in the days when East End thug Ray Robertson ran the Delilah Club. Ray and his younger brother, Georgie, were as bent as they come, but they kept order on the streets so that everyone could go out in the evening and have a good time. Now Georgie’s in stir, Ray’s missing, and the council is threatening to chuck Ma Robertson in an old age home so they can knock down her decrepit house and rehab the whole block. The Robertsons’ absence leaves the field open for dodgy fellows like Hugh Mercer to open new places like The Late Supper Club, places where musicians have their own private entrance so they can bring in whomever they like and whatever chemical enhancements they like and no one’s the wiser—places where an underage girl can fall out an upper-story window and no one can say how she fell or whom she came with or even what her name is. DS Barnard, despite his fondness for sharp clothes and flashy cars, hates this latest fashion in crime. So in spite of his superiors’ instance that he keep to the jobs he’s assigned—investigating the wave of violence against Soho’s cafe and bar owners, most likely at the hands of a Maltese mob looking to run a protection racket—Harry insists on nosing into the young partygoer’s death. His inquiry collides with the latest mission of his girlfriend, photographer Kate O’Donnell: helping her former beau, aspiring Liverpool musician Dave Donovan, locate his new girlfriend, singer Marie Collins, who’s disappeared on a quest to find a London agent.
The combination of murder, menace, and sexual jealousy provides Hall (Cover Up, 2017, etc.) a combustible mix, but the ensuing fireworks, both figurative and literal, provide her seventh entry more heat than light.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8826-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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