by Paul Doiron ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2022
Slow to get underway but the payoff is worth the wait.
A distress call takes Game Warden Mike Bowditch to a part of Maine he rarely sees: the tiny, rugged islands off the coast.
Kendra Ballard, project manager for the Maine Seabird Initiative, is seriously worried about the Initiative’s future. It’s come under pressure from local fishers whose attitude toward nature is unapologetically different from hers, and Kendra’s particularly worried about her boss, Dr. Maeve McLeary. So she asks her old college roommate, bush pilot/biologist/EMT/kayaking guide Stacey Stevens, if she’ll come out to visit and bring Mike, the lover with whom she’s recently been reunited after two years—and she also asks if Mike will please bring his gun. Mike and Stacey’s initial inquiries confirm Kendra’s suspicions that there’s trouble brewing in the place to which famed photographer Clay Markham has retired and that Maeve is indeed seriously disturbed. Apart from Kendra’s story about intern Evan Levandowski’s suicide and Mike’s unsettling confrontation with surly lobsterman Bear Goodale and his mate Chris Beckwith, however, it’s hard to put a finger on the source of the troubles. After an attack on a camp they’ve pitched on an island rumored to be littered with unexploded bombs leaves Kendra and one of her current interns dead and obscenely posed and the other intern missing, it’s no more clear who led the assault or why. Only the suicide of Maeve herself begins to bring the mystery into focus. Before it’s solved, Mike will have to call on every one of Stacey’s impressive list of skills and practice a couple he didn’t know he had himself.
Slow to get underway but the payoff is worth the wait.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-25023-513-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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by Carter Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2025
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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