This ambling novel is strong on period detail and atmosphere but repetitious and overforeshadowed.
In Depression-era Appalachia, a woman succeeds her late husband as sheriff in a small mountain town.
McCrumb’s latest starts on an eerie note: in a deserted mountain cabin, young women stage the ancient Halloween ritual known as the Dumb Supper. The purpose is to divine whom they will marry, but one of them, Celia, accidentally breaks the spell and, according to tradition, is cursed. Years later, Albert Robbins, recently elected sheriff of Sycamore Shoals, Tennessee, lays dying of pneumonia. His wife, Ellie, tends him and tries old remedies such as a mustard plaster, to no avail—soon she is a penniless widow with two young sons to feed. Accepting a grudging invitation to move back to Albert’s family farm, now owned by her miserly brother-in-law, would condemn Ellie and her sons to the fate of poor relations. Instead, she boldly requests that the city fathers appoint her as sheriff to serve out her husband’s term—the job is largely administrative, and she already knows how to shoot. She also has experience in facing down at least one criminal: the man next door, whom she dissuaded, at gunpoint, from further abuse of his wife. Meanwhile Celia, now a local schoolteacher, helps Lonnie Varden, an artist employed under a New Deal federal program, with historical research: he is painting a mural of the town’s frontier antecedents for the post office. As their mutual attraction grows, Celia worries that the Dumb Supper curse may be more than superstitious nonsense. How these minor characters intersect with the main plot finally becomes clear two-thirds of the way through this slow-paced narrative. Once married, Celia must quit teaching, while Lonnie gives up painting to work in the sawmill, with disastrous results. Suffice it to say that in addition to being a highly unprecedented female sheriff in the region, Ellie is unexpectedly faced with another unheard-of role: hangwoman.
This ambling novel is strong on period detail and atmosphere but repetitious and overforeshadowed.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7281-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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