by Sheri Cobb South ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2015
Despite South’s blithe disregard of social customs of Jane Austen’s era, this fourth frothy whodunit for Pickett (Family...
An attempt at matchmaking takes a wrong turn into murder.
Emily, Lady Dunnington, thinks her widowed friend Julia, Lady Fieldhurst, needs a lover. It’s dull in town, the season is over, and so Lady Dunnington invites a quintet of candidates to a dinner party at which she and Lady Fieldhurst are the only women. Lady Dunnington lives apart from her husband and thinks she can do just as she wants, including setting her own sights on the disreputable but handsome Lord Rupert Latham, with whom Lady Fieldhurst once attempted an assignation. Lord Dunnington’s arrival in the middle of the party doesn’t exactly inspire romance, and the five gentlemen invited find excuses to leave before they can partake of their port. Lord Rupert doesn’t go far: someone shoots him in the chest and tosses the pistol away. Although Lady Fieldhurst is shocked at his death, she admits to herself that she’s relieved. She’s already lost her heart, though to a most unsuitable man, the Bow Street Runner John Pickett, who helped her escape hanging for her late husband’s murder. To her dismay, he’s assigned to the case of the murdered Lord Rupert. His dismay is even greater; he has to find a way to reveal that, thanks to a peculiarity of Scottish law, he and Lady Fieldhurst are accidentally married. While he interviews the dinner guests, each of whom had a reason to hate Lord Rupert, Pickett faces the prospect of a humiliating means of annulling his marriage to Lady Fieldhurst, though each secretly wishes it could be otherwise. In fact, the greatest suspense here is whether Pickett will overcome his diffidence and Lady Fieldhurst her pride or whether the contrived variation on that Regency wheeze, the marriage in name only, will drag on into a sequel.
Despite South’s blithe disregard of social customs of Jane Austen’s era, this fourth frothy whodunit for Pickett (Family Plot, 2014, etc.) has a satisfying surprise or two and a duo who really are made for each other.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4328-3096-0
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
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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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
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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