Amateur gumshoes bolstered by a tropical setting and the added pressure of trying to sustain a business.
In this debut thriller, a Canadian man purchases a Costa Rican beachside bar, but cops are more interested in him as a suspect in the previous owner’s murder.
A hung over Ben Cooper has no idea why he awakens in a Tamarindo jail. He doesn’t remember anything from last night, much less buying a bar—or killing its owner/seller, Antonio Guiterrez. Nevertheless, authorities arrest him for the murder, and Ben’s attorney pal back in Toronto, Victoria Holmes, comes to his rescue. His other friend, Miguel Valares, is in Costa Rica with Ben, both taking advantage of the latter’s defunct wedding and nonrefundable honeymoon tickets and hotel accommodations. Victoria gets Ben out of prison, but now he has a bar to run, especially because a stop payment isn’t feasible. (He drunkenly changed the password and security question to his and ex-fiancee Tara Whitmore’s joint bank account and, of course, forgot them.) Since the bar’s in debt, new partners Victoria and Miguel help financially and by drumming up business; Victoria, for one, shows off her DJ skills. The murder, however, takes precedence thanks to Detective Vasquez, who’s convinced that Ben’s guilty, and an anonymous note implying Ben will be the next victim. The three Canadians, along with Ana, Antonio’s niece, who believes in Ben’s innocence, set out to thwart a murderer. The author keeps his tale popping with ample subplots, tossing a blackmailer and an apparent vandal targeting Ben and Miguel’s rental car into the mix. Some of these turn out to be red herrings, but it’s unmistakable that Ben, and possibly others, is in jeopardy, particularly once the killer lets his (or her) presence be known. There’s a good deal of humor, a highlight being Miguel’s Uncle Enrico, who pays for a “pretend-ownership” of the bar and believes solving a murder is part of said deal. Contrarily, Ben’s recurrent, daily endeavors to guess his password are ultimately redundant. He’s no longer attempting to cancel payment—he and his partners/friends are completely invested in the bar— while his reasoning that “it would be nice to have access to his bank account again” is too blasé to bear much weight for readers.
Amateur gumshoes bolstered by a tropical setting and the added pressure of trying to sustain a business.Pub Date: June 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4328-3189-9
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Five Star
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2016
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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