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DROP DEAD ON RECALL

Boneham’s debut, which supplements its menagerie of human suspects with oodles of information on obedience trials, will...

An Indiana photographer whose life revolves around her dog becomes a reluctant bloodhound.

Janet MacPhail and her Australian shepherd, Jay, are competing at an obedience trial near their Fort Wayne home when Abigail Dorn, a respected but not very well-liked woman, collapses and dies. Janet helps out by taking Abigail’s award-winning border collie, Pip, home with her while Greg Dorn waits with his stricken spouse. What at first seems to be an allergic reaction turns out to be a poisoning. The police are initially suspicious of Janet, who has not only Pip, but all of Abigail’s stuff, including some leftover food containers she’s unfortunately run through her dishwasher. But police Detective Jo Stevens, who doesn’t really think Janet is a murderer, relies on her to explain the minutiae of dog breeding and showing. Greg emerges as the main suspect, since he may have been having an affair with Suzette Anderson, whose border collie, Fly, is number two behind Pip. Janet must deal with her mother’s descent into dementia and her attraction to Tom Saunders, who’s showing a Labrador retriever named Drake. In between these problems, she digs up dirt on a breeder who may have falsified breeding records and another dog person who’s obsessed with Greg. Even Tom is a suspect because his mother was left out when Abigail’s side of the family inherited a fortune, and he’s a college professor with expertise in poisonous plants. When Janet starts receiving threats and her cat is kidnapped, she redoubles her efforts to find the truth.

Boneham’s debut, which supplements its menagerie of human suspects with oodles of information on obedience trials, will delight dog fanciers.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-7387-3306-7

Page Count: 408

Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn

Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012

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BADLANDS

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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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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