An often entertaining and timely crime novel.
A loathsome man is murdered, but the detective on the case keeps coming up empty in Williams’ mystery series installment.
When actuary Devin McDonald is murdered by a speeding car, the list of suspects is very long, indeed; he was an “overbearing, pompous windbag” seemingly despised by everyone at the insurance company where he worked. Police detectives Salvador Mitchelland Eddie “Sandman” Sandovan discover that terrorizing co-workers wasn’t enough for him; he was also a “prolific commenter” on social media forums, relentlessly antagonizing his interlocuters—a miserable example of “toxic disinhibition,” which leads the two detectives to wonder if he might have been killed by someone he offended online. Nonetheless, they’re at their wits’ end after failing to come up with any concrete leads. However, the killer, Kenneth Slocombe, a deeply disturbed man who considered his act of murder “righteous retribution” for Devin’s anti-social transgressions, is livid that his act hasn’t received more attention, and he decides to target Mitchell and Sandovan. Meanwhile, Mitchell faces a difficult moral dilemma when he discovers that Alastair Laing, the father of his girlfriend, Mya, is having an extramarital affair. Williams intelligently constructs a gripping crime drama, and it’s no less suspenseful for the fact that the identity of the killer is never concealed from readers. The principal weakness of the novel, however, is the characterization of Kenneth, who seems like a stale caricature; his sections are often a patchwork of clichés. Williams’ prose is often sharp—unadorned but dramatically effective. However, it slips into banality whenever Kenneth appears: “Kenneth went about his normal routine, wondering if his life would be different. He was, after all, a murderer. He had taken a life. Ended a fellow human being’s existence. Violated the most serious of the commandments.” Still, the story remains a captivating one that thoughtfully explores the way that online acrimony can transform into real-life violence.
An often entertaining and timely crime novel.Pub Date: July 25, 2021
ISBN: 979-8525735897
Page Count: 389
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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