Next book

STICK TOGETHER

Best enjoyed by readers who’ll happily accept a low surprise quotient in return for needle-sharp portraits of professional...

Forced to buy into an unwanted case for a logical but excruciatingly painful reason, Commissaire Anne Capestan drags her squad of Île-de-France rejects (The Awkward Squad, 2017) along for the ride.

Who should investigate the fatal shooting of retired Commissaire Serge Rufus, of the Brigade Antigang? The obvious candidate is the members of Paris’ Brigade Criminelle. But Capestan’s boss, Directeur Buron, wants her squad of officers, exiled from their original posts because of misbehavior or incompetence, to join—though not lead, he carefully adds—the investigation, because she was until recently married to the victim’s son, comedian-turned–club owner Paul Rufus. Capestan hasn’t even wanted to see Paul. Now she has to comfort him, question him, and protect him from what promises to be a considerable buffeting after his father’s death turns out to be only part of a larger pattern. Provencal furniture manufacturer Jacques Maire has already been murdered in a way that clearly connects his death to Serge’s, and a third murder will confirm the pattern. A ray of hope shines when the squad’s deep data dig links all three homicides to a 25-year-old armed robbery that left two dead at the Minerva Bank in Lyon, especially since convicted robber Max Ramier has just been released from prison after serving his time. But Ramier first humiliates Capestan by eluding the dragnet she’s spread around him and then has the impudence to get murdered himself, leaving the squad back at square one—unless they care to cast a cold eye at Capitaine Orsini, one of their own number whom the evidence uncomfortably implicates in the Minerva Bank job.

Best enjoyed by readers who’ll happily accept a low surprise quotient in return for needle-sharp portraits of professional infighting among France’s finest.

Pub Date: April 4, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-63506-015-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Mobius

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018

Next book

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 29


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE A LIST

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 29


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

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

Close Quickview