Masters (Smoke Alarm, 2012, etc.) provides another entertaining procedural whose twists will keep you guessing.
A four-year-old child vanishes so completely that rumor has it the devil took her.
Drunken Tracy Walsh has an argument with her boyfriend, Neil Mansfield; snatches her screaming daughter, Daisy, from her bed; and takes off up the Burway toward the Devil’s Chair, an area of England long associated with witchcraft and strange happenings. Early the next morning, an unidentified caller reports a crashed car with a woman inside. Tracy is rushed to the hospital in critical condition, but a massive search turns up no trace of Daisy save one of her slippers. Leading the case is DI Alex Randall, whose wife is mentally ill. He’s made coroner Martha Gunn his sounding board on tough cases even as they fight their attraction for each other. The police leave no stone unturned. Re-examining the empty cottage from which the emergency call was made, they find another slipper that hadn’t been there when they first searched. The owner of the cottage, who’s been out of the country, has a checkered history: Years before she’d been accused of murdering her entire family with poisonous mushrooms. Neil, always much more loving and engaged with Daisy than her mother was, is having an affair with a client who desperately wants a child. When Tracy dies, her estranged family takes a sudden interest in the beautiful Daisy because it appears they might make some money from her tragic story. The enigmatic clues someone is providing the police lead nowhere until Martha dredges up an old memory that will help crack the mystifying case.
Masters (Smoke Alarm, 2012, etc.) provides another entertaining procedural whose twists will keep you guessing.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8389-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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