A promising new series from a dog lover (Fixing Freddie: A True Story About a Boy, a Single Mom, and the Very Bad Beagle Who...
A retired military police officer and her adopted bomb-sniffing Belgian Malinois seek a new lease on life in rural Vermont.
Following the death of Sgt. Martinez, her dog-handler fiance, in Afghanistan, Mercy Carr and Elvis, Martinez’s dog, have moved back to Vermont to recover from their physical and psychological wounds. During a hike in the woods, they find a recently abandoned baby. Seeking help, they meet Game Warden Troy Warner and Susie Bear, his enormous Newfoundland-retriever mix. The chance discovery will lead to murder, mayhem, and romance. Mercy has marked off the area because Elvis acted suspicious even before his find. When the authorities check the spot, they find human bones, a skull with a bullet in it, and a handmade belt buckle that might help identify the remains. The baby’s mother, Amy Walker, sneaks into the hospital and steals her baby, then turns up at Mercy’s house. Her home life with an abusive stepfather has kept her on the run while Adam, the artist and activist who’s the baby’s father, has forced them to live off the grid. Mercy wants to help Amy keep her baby, but when she finds the stepfather murdered, things look bad for Amy, especially in the eyes of self-aggrandizing State Police Detective Kai Harrington, who, unimpressed by Mercy or Troy Warner, warns them off the case. The bones that alerted Elvis are most likely those of local troublemaker Wayne Herbert, whose mother and brothers are still enmeshed in many illegal enterprises. Determined to tackle Amy’s problems and the possibly related case of Herbert, Mercy puts herself and Elvis in danger as they continue to hunt up clues with the help of a reluctant Troy, Susie Bear, and Mercy’s grandmother, a well-loved veterinarian with many helpful contacts.
A promising new series from a dog lover (Fixing Freddie: A True Story About a Boy, a Single Mom, and the Very Bad Beagle Who Saved Them, 2010, etc.) who naturally features several dogs as detective partners.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-15303-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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