BONE CHILLING

Diverse crimes on New Zealand’s South Island challenge an engaging, methodical criminalist.

Traveling forensic investigator Alexa Glock dutifully cancels a weekend getaway with boyfriend DI Bruce Home and his two daughters, Denise and Sammie, when her boss Dan Goddard calls her in distress about his Aunt Phyllis’s bobbled cremains. Scarcely is this comic snafu resolved when duty calls in another direction both less and more urgent. Alexa responds by traveling from the fire of a crematorium to the ice of remote Mount Aspiring National Park, on New Zealand’s South Island near the resort city of Queenstown, to examine some body parts found on a glacier. Despite her dedication, Alexa finds herself out of her element and struggles. Her sixth case floats to a great extent on Alexa’s combination of charm and curiosity. So Johnson supplements detailed descriptions of forensic examinations with the complexities of her personal life, as well as background on the geography and culture of the locations to which she’s sent. Periodic snowfalls frustratingly complicate Alexa’s work. Barely has she begun to untangle the glacier mystery when other urgent cases demand her attention. These include a suspicious, fatal fire at Papa Penguin’s Pizza and an avalanche that triggers a report of multiple missing persons. An additional italicized narrative thread, documenting a Mount Aspiring expedition in 1984, runs through the novel and focuses the glacier mystery as the main event.

A breezy forensic mystery chockablock with procedural detail and local color.