Plenty of quirky Yankee characters and a clever clue make for an enjoyable read.
A Connecticut town is slowly returning from the dead.
Josie Blair returned to her hometown of Dorset Falls after being fired from her high-powered but stressful job as a fashion designer in Manhattan. She’s moved onto the farm with her great uncle Eb and taken over his wife’s yarn shop, Miss Marple Knits, despite her inability to cast on a single stitch herself. In addition to solving a murder (Yarned and Dangerous, 2015), she’s made many new friends and several enemies. Josie’s thrilled to rent out the building she owns next door to Lyndon Bailey and his partner, Harry, for their antiques shop but less pleasantly thrilled when she finds Lyndon stabbed with antique sheep shears and Harry standing over the body. Despite dire appearances, she thinks Harry is innocent but does her best not to get involved. Apart from whatever desire he might have had to inherit the business, Harry might have been motivated by jealousy because a Hollywood producer had planned to star Lyndon and his stunning niece, Taylor Philbin, in a new antiques reality show. As she attempts to stifle her interest in Lyndon’s murder, Josie remains determined to help her friend Lorna, whose cooking keeps the customers coming back to Dougie’s General Store despite Dougie’s laziness and bad manners. Lorna’s saving to open her own restaurant—something sure to make Dougie furious when he finds out. When the arrogant producer and the snobbish Taylor show up and insist Josie let them into the store, they get her dander up. As it turns out, a box of doilies she bought from Lyndon holds clues to both his murder and a cold case that’s been upsetting some of her new knitting friends for years.
Plenty of quirky Yankee characters and a clever clue make for an enjoyable read.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61773-720-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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