History, suspense, and an appealing heroine combine in a series debut that should attract war buffs and many others.
Edwardian specialist Arlen (Death of an Unsung Hero, 2018, etc.) leaps forward 25 years to showcase a dedicated wartime volunteer who learns that the real danger in her hometown is not from the enemy overseas.
Little Buffenden was a quiet English village before World War II, but in the midst of the battle with the Nazis, the more immediate invasion is from the Yanks. Poppy Redfern and her grandparents have turned over their ancestral home, Reaches, to the American airmen known as the Midnight Raiders and moved temporarily to a smaller building on the property. Poppy, who serves as the Air Raid Precaution warden for the village, has a nighttime run-in with Lt. Griff O’Neal, one of the pilots, when each mistakes the other for the enemy. After that meet-cute, Poppy tries to focus on her business of enforcing blackout rules, but the other young women in the village are more attuned to the social benefits of so many visiting soldiers so eager for female companionship. In fact, village gossip suggests that one of the airmen has helped Doreen Newcombe get over her grief for her late fiance. After Doreen’s body, strangled with a nylon stocking, is found in the churchyard, sleepy Little Buffenden is no longer safe, and Poppy’s grandparents prevail upon her to accept Cpl. Sid Ritchie of the Home Guard as an escort. Although Poppy finds Sid tiresome, she agrees to please her grandparents. A second murder of one of the young women she’s known all her life motivates Poppy to do her own detective work, with some help from her dog and the increasingly friendly Griff. The nighttime actions of a bird-watcher suspected of the murders, Poppy’s discovery of a secret tunnel, a clue in the form of camphor, and her ambivalence about whether to accept Griff’s suit lead to an unsurprising denouement featuring a suspect who’s been under Poppy’s nose all along.
History, suspense, and an appealing heroine combine in a series debut that should attract war buffs and many others.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0580-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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