A fun read from an author worth watching.
A team races to expose a document that could rewrite our understanding of American history.
Richardson makes his assured fiction debut with a thriller that questions the actions of one of America’s most towering figures. When Matt Hawkins, an antiques dealer in Savannah, Georgia, finds a diary hidden inside an old atlas, he has no idea that it will reveal that George Washington wrote a letter of surrender during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War. The letter was drafted but never reached its intended recipient, thereby allowing the Americans to continue their fight and claw back to victory. Hawkins realizes the implications of this revelation and enlists the help of a local scholar and her history-buff father to help him investigate the diary’s claims and eventually go searching for the letter. At the same time, a rising presidential candidate whose lineage traces directly back to George Washington has staked his campaign on the image of the founding father. When his operatives learn of Hawkins’ discovery, they dispatch ruthless agents to ensure the documents never become public. The two parties meet with predictably explosive consequences, setting up a few memorable set pieces and giving the story a welcome shot of adrenaline. The narrative toggles between the present and past, revealing the circuitous path the letter took as the main characters gather clues to determine its final resting place. Anyone familiar with the recent glut of historical revisionist thrillers will find a lot that is familiar in Richardson’s novel, but that doesn't diminish the simple pleasure of a well-told story. This one is complete with genre touchstones like a dashing academic, a deformed villain, a charmingly rumpled hero and a secretive society. The novel is consistently exciting, even if the stakes never feel quite as high as the characters insist, and it’s not until late in the story that it begins to bend its own rules to the breaking point. Readers will find a page-turning read filled with likable characters and enough real history to make it all feel believable. This could signal the arrival of a welcome new voice in the genre.
A fun read from an author worth watching.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4991-7588-2
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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