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SLUGFEST

Daisies won’t tell, but Harris does in her hilarious look at gardeners gone wild.

The owner of a Connecticut nursery finds mayhem in the marigolds when she attends New York’s premier flower show.

Paula Holliday (Dead Head, 2010, etc.) left the Big Apple when life as a TV producer got too hectic. Now she’s back selling her friend Primo Dunstan’s eccentric trash sculptures at the Big Apple Flower Show. Of course purists like Allegra Douglas think vendors have no place in the horticultural showcase, but its ambitious director Kristi Reynolds who wants her event to rival Philadelphia’s legendary flower show. So Paula ends up with a badge that satisfies even a martinet like security guard Rolanda Knox, and in she goes, taking with her the backpack of struggling student Garland Bleimeister, whose credentials don’t meet Knox’s strict standards. Paula doesn’t foresee the endless catastrophes that infest the Big Apple show like aphids. First someone knocks off Connie Anzalone’s prized veronicas. Then somebody knocks off custodian Otis Randolph. Now Paula begins to feel queasy about what’s in the bag, neatly stowed underneath a table full of Primo’s artwork. When Garland himself is killed, the police fixate on Jamal Harrington, one of the inner-city kids' middle-school teachers Lauryn Peete has encouraged to enter the show. But Paula thinks that whoever dropped a bag of cosmetics in the ladies’ room after telling off her male companion is somehow involved. Should she share her suspicions with police detective John Stancik? Or, cute as Stancik is, should she pursue her hunch on her own?

Daisies won’t tell, but Harris does in her hilarious look at gardeners gone wild.

Pub Date: May 3, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-312-56996-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: April 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011

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BADLANDS

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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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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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