Novelist, playwright, composer Holmes has nostalgia down pat—though he’s got some work to do on tension. (CD bound in with...
A big-band musician on the run from the ruins of his happy marriage gets tangled up in Big Events at the 1940 San Francisco World’s Fair.
The Big Events have to do with the coming cataclysm of WWII, but alto saxophonist and talented arranger Ray Sherwood, already badly wounded by his young daughter’s accidental death, seems largely unaware of international tensions. Playing with a touring band at a swell hotel in Oakland, Sherwood has received an invitation to meet and work with ambitious young composer Gail Prentice. The two rendezvous on the San Francisco Bay island created for the Golden Gate World Exposition. Just as he is getting acquainted with the very attractive young composer, who is eking out her college fees with work as a carilloneuse at the fair, Sherwood is an unhappy witness to the apparent suicide of a Frenchwoman who, earlier, had appealed to him to rescue her from deportation. In the small world of pre-boom California (as before—in Where The Truth Lies, 2003—Holmes’s feel for mid-century America is exceptional), it’s easy enough for the reader to accept the many coincidences and connections that tie the dead woman to events surrounding Gail and Ray as they hammer out an orchestration for “Swing,” Gail’s prizewinning piano composition that’s to be played by a Japanese band before the fair closes. One of the coincidental connections has to do with Ray’s nearby ex-wife, Nancy, now business manager for fan dancer and fair attraction Sally Rand. Nancy’s presence takes the edge off Ray’s feelings for Gail, feelings that become an embarrassment after Gail’s gloomy mother suggests that she and Sherwood have a past. Everything comes to a boil when “Swing” finally gets a hearing.
Novelist, playwright, composer Holmes has nostalgia down pat—though he’s got some work to do on tension. (CD bound in with music from the book)Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6158-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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