INVESTIGATING MR WAKEFIELD

Name: INVESTIGATING MR WAKEFIELD
Author: Rob Gittins
ISBN: 978-1-78461-239-9

by Rob Gittins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2016

Gittins (Secret Shelter, 2015, etc.) takes forever to navigate past the overlong flashbacks that dot the first half of this...

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Gittins’ fourth novel updates the premise of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s memorably enigmatic little fable “Wakefield”—a man abandons his wife on a whim, moves one street away, then returns to her 20 years later on another whim—for the surveillance age.

Jack Connolly has always assumed he can trust Tia, the event planner who’s his frequent partner in business and bed. But maybe that’s just because he’s never thought about it. After all, Jack himself isn’t entirely trustworthy. His star as a noted photojournalist fell with the disclosure that he’d faked an iconic picture. So when he spots Tia in a briefly suggestive pose with Joseph, the co-owner of her agency, he can’t help wondering if she’s got something going. A nasty railroad accident outside London soon gives him his chance. He packs his bags, moves into a hotel, and waits to see how his ladylove reacts to her increasingly sharp suspicion that he was one of the casualties aboard the train. The refinement Jack adds to Hawthorne’s model is a battery of state-of-the-art surveillance devices that allow him to track Tia’s every move and, as long as she stays in their flat, catch well-nigh every facial expression. What he sees tells him that she’s clearly frantic, then genuinely grieved, and that she’s got secrets he’s never suspected. But nothing he sees persuades him to return. Like Hawthorne’s feckless hero, he keeps thinking from moment to moment that he’ll go back. But something keeps coming up to prevent him, mostly in the guise of faces from his past—his ex-lover Natsuo, heavy-handed dilettante Toby Vine, a light-fingered pawnbroker named Ben, and of course Dom, the insinuating surveillance expert—who suddenly turn up on his radar in unsettling new roles.

Gittins (Secret Shelter, 2015, etc.) takes forever to navigate past the overlong flashbacks that dot the first half of this tale. Readers who survive this extended setup, however, will find themselves irresistibly drawn into Jack’s paranoid world of self-induced claustrophobia.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-78461-239-9

Page Count: 408

Publisher: Dufour

Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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BADLANDS

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

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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.