Like Murder in the Abstract (2010): wickedly funny about professional fundraising; very arch about chubbiness and romance;...
A green-eyed detective, an overly protective, rich ex-husband and a dashing TV celebrity compete for smart-mouthed, foolhardy Dani O’Rourke’s attention.
Cadging funds to underwrite the Devor Museum’s new installation to house the King’s Jar, a 2-foot-tall sub-Saharan African antiquity found in Kenobia and donated to the San Francisco museum by billionaire Fritz McBeel, falls to staffer Dani O’Rourke. As she’s juggling plans for a gala dinner at New York’s posh Pilgrim Club for wealthy and politically connected dignitaries while soothing the curator’s catalogue challenges, a terrible tragedy occurs: The King’s Jar goes missing from the vault it had been stored in at Warefield University. Almost as dreadful, if rather less mourned, scholar Rene Bouvier, who’d been charged with overseeing the safety of the artifact, lies bashed to death in his university lab. Stepping up to find the jar and the killer, Dani is stymied by conflicting directives from McBeel and his second wife, Jamie, who disagree on whom the jar belongs to, a matter further complicated when Kenobia’s ambassador, Keile Obarri, seems to threaten Jamie and argue with Fritz at the Pilgrim Club. Then Dani finds Jamie strangled in her tony office. Instead of high-tailing it out of the place and calling the cops, she pockets a key and a note partially hidden under Jamie’s body. The green-eyed detective warns her to behave. Her ex-hubby rushes back from the Bahamas to protect her. The television celebrity seals his lies with a kiss. Lawyers, a former wife, and rumors about life, death and bribes in Kenobia will surface before Dani can curl up with her cat, Fever, for a restorative nap.
Like Murder in the Abstract (2010): wickedly funny about professional fundraising; very arch about chubbiness and romance; and labored in its attempts to make all the plot holes disappear.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938938-04-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Top Five Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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