Leisurely to the point of inertia, with barely a glimmer of Father Dowling and his pipe (Grave Undertakings, 2000, etc.),...
Maud Gorman, the most flirtatious septuagenarian at St. Hilary's Senior Center, brings widowed former brothers-in-law Jack Gallagher and Austin Rooney to blows—and to a lawsuit over who hit whom first in re Gorman. But before their suit comes to trial, Jack is headed to court on another matter: his confession that he romanced and killed sexy young Aggie Rossner, a litigator at the law firm of Mallard and Bill, where his daughter Colleen works as a paralegal. Both Colleen and her married brother Tim, however, seem to have stronger motives for murder than their former radio host and still publicity-hungry dad: Colleen was angry about Aggie's attempts to seduce her fiancé, rising legal star Mario Liberati, and Tim was eager to keep his brief fling with Aggie a secret from his wife. Furthermore, Aggie's romantic escapades did not stop with the Gallaghers; Linda Hopkins, a chambermaid at the Hacienda Motel, saw her with another Mallard and Bill lawyer, but she's already exited the case via a close encounter with oncoming traffic before she can identify him. The police are stymied, but Father Dowling, in what amounts to a cameo appearance, appears at the murderer's doorstep in time to rescue Colleen from his clutches and turn him over to Fox River Police Captain Phil Keegan.
Leisurely to the point of inertia, with barely a glimmer of Father Dowling and his pipe (Grave Undertakings, 2000, etc.), but way too much of his gossipy housekeeper Marie.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26948-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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