Marvelously paced and plotted: Edric’s story builds momentum steadily from first page to final climax.
In a taut and brooding thriller, Edric (Peacetime, 2004, etc.) follows a p.i. deep into the pit of depravity while investigating the case of a pedophilic serial killer.
The northern English town of Hull is a charmless gray place that manages to find room for all that’s bad about Britain (food and weather, for example) without admitting many of its virtues—and, lately, perversion and brutality have been stirred into the stew. Hull became infamous ten years before, when two children there killed a boy for no discernible reason. This atmosphere of nihilism and despair informs the narrative of Leo Rivers, a private investigator who is approached by James Bishop, the father of a teenaged girl who went missing some years back. Bishop’s daughter Nicola has never been found, but when the notorious murderer and pornographer Martin Roper was convicted of a separate killing some years earlier, he claimed (with some pride but no proof) to have killed Nicola as well. Rumors are circulating that Roper is appealing his conviction, offering information on the whereabouts of Nicola and several other missing girls in exchange for his appeal, and Bishop wants Leo to find out what’s going on. That turns out to be harder than you might think: Roper’s trial was so lurid that most of it was conducted in a cleared courtroom, and much of the testimony is permanently sealed. It soon becomes apparent that there are more than a few people with an interest in keeping the case closed and forgotten. Leo tracks down the odd insider (press agents, prison guards, and others) willing to talk, but most of his usual sources seem to be stonewalling. When an old classmate of Nicola’s is murdered not long after Leo interviews her, the case is suddenly hot again. But who is behind it?
Marvelously paced and plotted: Edric’s story builds momentum steadily from first page to final climax.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-552-77142-2
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Black Swan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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