The result reads like a stranger-than-strange collaboration between Lee Child, handling the assault on the CIA with baleful...
The seventh of Wortham’s Red River mysteries brings a pair of sinister intruders into Center Springs, Texas, in 1969 to launch a crime so monstrous that two of the town’s patriarchs will have to travel far from home to avenge it.
Pilot Curtis Gaines has been hired to spray water filled with what a pair of government agents calling themselves Mr. Brown and Mr. Green tell him is water infused with “microscopic metal particles our scientists call ‘Gold Dust’ " over Lamar County. In fact, the Gold Dust is actually a combination of bacillus globigii and bacillus subtilis. Though it’s thought to be harmless, it actually has a toxic effect on anybody frail and elderly, like centenarian elevator operator Jules Benton, or anybody with asthma, like Constable Ned Parker’s teenage grandson Top, or anybody whose system has been weakened by a recent surgery, like Curtis himself. Apart from the sudden outbreak of mysterious illnesses, Ned, along with Deputy Anna Sloan and retired Texas Ranger Tom Bell, recently returned from a sojourn in Mexico thought to have left him dead, has to contend with a pair of murderous cattle rustlers and the rumor, spitefully initiated by Top’s nearly identical female cousin, Pepper, that there’s a treasure in gold buried close by. While Wortham (Unraveled, 2016, etc.) is still introducing more relatives and hangers-on to the Parkers in Center Springs, Ned, infuriated as his grandson hovers near death, decides to go directly to the CIA in Washington to get vengeance. Tom joins him on the 1,200-mile drive and the unlikely game of polecat-and-mouse that unfolds in a series of developments as preposterous as they are richly enjoyable.
The result reads like a stranger-than-strange collaboration between Lee Child, handling the assault on the CIA with baleful directness, and Steven F. Havill, genially reporting on the regulars back home.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0961-1
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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