The titled heroine is implausible but charming, and the plot is crammed as full of intrigue as a Viennese pastry is of...
Weeks (Awakening Avalon, 2014, etc.) introduces an intrepid new heroine, Countess Beatrice "Trixie" von Falkenburg, who crosses the Continent to solve a puzzle in her first foray in the demimonde.
The Countess of Falkenburg is distracted from society gossip and the woes of the declining aristocracy by a call from her dear Uncle Berty, aka the distinguished Gen. Albrecht Schönburg-Hartenstein. A body washed up in the Vltava River may well be that of Alois Tager, Berty’s batman throughout his years in the army, who was supposed to be safely in a home for aged veterans. The possibility of Alois’ death occasions not just sentimental sadness for Uncle Berty, but also serious financial risk. Berty and prosperous merchant Isidor Pinkerstein are the last two members of a Tontine, a gambling syndicate based on the life expectancy of the members' chosen proxies, with an enormous reward as the prize to the last survivor. Alois, of course, was Uncle Berty's stand-in, and Berty isn't sure that was really him in the river, so he asks Trixie to investigate—since no one will suspect "a perfectly respectable Countess....It is the perfect disguise." The theater is currently home to the Union of Servants, whose gatherings Trixie infiltrates to find the only thing more scandalous than labor organizing: valets and ladies’ maids dressed in swiped finery and aping their betters. Duly energized, Trixie sets out on a mad chase across the railways of Europe, finding another corpse along the way and ending in London. Motley clues lead to an astonishing scheme that threatens the most horrific weapon of war the world has yet seen and puts the very lives of King Edward and Kaiser Wilhelm at risk.
The titled heroine is implausible but charming, and the plot is crammed as full of intrigue as a Viennese pastry is of cream. Weeks blends equal parts espionage and farce into a frothy confection that ends perhaps a bit too darkly on intimations of World War I.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0842-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
