Louise’s fifth outing (Louise’s Dilemma, 2013, etc.) once again takes the smart and independent heroine into one of the...
An intelligence agent gets more than she bargained for when she’s promoted during the final days of World War II.
Louise Pearlie is hopeful that her new assignment within the OSS will be more exciting than her previous post as a glorified file clerk. She’s now part of Morale Operations, which creates and disseminates black propaganda—disinformation intended to hasten the fall of the Third Reich. She’s hardly settled into her new office when she’s bundled onto a plane, along with her no-nonsense boss, Alice Osborne, and her Texan colleague Merle Ellison, and flown to nearby Fort Meade, site of a newly opened POW camp. They’re to interview German POWs for possible recruitment as double agents, with Merle, a third-generation German-American, as interpreter. Although they find three likely candidates, none of whom shows any love for the Wehrmacht, one of them has a dismaying tendency to escape the camp, if only to enjoy a few hours of pleasure outside the compound. The second one, it seems, could be easily bribed with a pair of cowboy boots like Merle’s, and the third, a seminary student, was conscripted against his religion and his will. But warning signs that frighten the prisoners and the death of one of the possible recruits put the black-ops plan in jeopardy, especially since there may be a connection with two prisoners who disappeared on the voyage to the States. And after Louise asks her secret lover, a Czech nationalist involved in a covert rescue operation, to help investigate the backgrounds of the missing men, both drafted from the same house in the Sudetenland, she and her colleagues realize they’re up against a powerful opponent.
Louise’s fifth outing (Louise’s Dilemma, 2013, etc.) once again takes the smart and independent heroine into one of the lesser-known arenas of the war. Solid characterizations and a faithful re-creation of wartime life more than make up for the leisurely pace.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8552-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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