Hodge’s debut thriller has an FBI agent pursuing an elusive serial killer whose murders share more than a passing resemblance to a popular TV series.
The new interactive TV show TEN is a standard crime series until the final act of each weekly episode, presented live and allowing the audience to guess whodunit via a website or text. A gimmick, yes, but it’s also the reason the show’s a runaway hit. However, when a few real-life murders and attacks echo the series—e.g., taking place in the same city as the respective episode—Special Agent Lincoln Polk initiates an investigation. Polk links the murders by the killer’s habit of cutting a finger from every victim, though legal wrangling from the show’s producers, who want to keep the upcoming scripts a secret, makes things difficult. That is, until Polk realizes that the murderer may not be randomly choosing his victims—it might be a personal agenda. Hodge’s novel is a steady, meticulously plotted thriller of epic proportions. Perhaps a little too epic, as Polk’s interminable reviewing of the facts covers most of the 650 pages, while snippets of the killer’s perspective offer only a modicum of suspense. Nevertheless, the murders are deliciously diabolical, the causes of death including electrocution and liquid nitrogen, and readers will quickly learn the bizarre but unforgettable meaning behind choosing a different finger per victim. Hodge presents the story in an array of striking ways: a blog, radio shows, a campus security incident log—all of which break up the monotony of a lengthy procedural. There are also numerous references to TV crime series, some directly, others more covert. Polk’s romance with neighbor Sylvia, who watches his dog, and the romance he longs for with FBI-mandated therapist Dr. Tracey Arnold don’t have much substance. But Polk himself is a fascinating protagonist, psychologically tormented by a fatal shooting from less than a year before—a detail that, like the killer’s identity, isn’t revealed until later.
Despite its breadth and minimal focus on a disturbing killer, the never-tedious story is engaging from beginning to end.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1482824315
Page Count: 656
Publisher: PartridgeSingapore
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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