Peden’s debut paints a matter-of-fact picture of the city that lives for music. Her heroine is a typical cozy sleuth, bright...
A Nashville travel agent’s nosiness may be the death of her.
When Campbell Hale learns that her boyfriend, lawyer Doug Elliott, is repossessing some paintings from the wife of country music legend Jake Miller, she begs to go along. Doug’s brother, Ken, owns an art gallery, and Jake’s widow, Hazel Miller, has not paid for pictures she bought and is willing to return them. At the mansion, Campbell, enthralled by all the memorabilia, wanders off while Doug is loading paintings and accidentally opens the door to Hazel’s bedroom. As they depart, Hazel’s personal assistant, George Lewis, is refusing entry to a very angry young man. When Hazel is found dead in bed that evening, gossip suggests pills and booze as the cause. When police detective Sam Davis, who’s investigating Hazel’s death as a possible murder, comes to interview Campbell, she admits to opening the bedroom door and seeing a huddled figure in the bed. Although she’s not a suspect, Campbell just can’t keep herself from nosing around for clues despite dire warnings from Doug, who becomes more and more distant as she continues to investigate. The angry young man turns out to be Jake’s grandson, whose mother, adopted by the couple, is actually Jake’s natural daughter by a country music star who was just starting her career when her daughter was born and was forced to give her up. As Doug continues to sulk over her sleuthing, Campbell develops a more than professional interest in Davis. After George Lewis becomes the next victim, Campbell gets threats warning her to mind her business. But she keeps turning up more information that poses a threat to the unknown killer.
Peden’s debut paints a matter-of-fact picture of the city that lives for music. Her heroine is a typical cozy sleuth, bright and gutsy but also rather foolhardy as she stumbles in and out of dangerous situations while solving a murder whose solution many readers will spot ahead of her.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12268-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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