The opening of Harris’ (The Lazarus Curse, 2014, etc.) latest 18th-century romantic mystery nearly bogs down in back story....
Deception, murder and land wars thwart Dr. Thomas Silkstone’s latest attempt to find happiness with his beloved Lydia.
For hundreds of years, the villagers of Brandwick have enjoyed common land that Sir Montagu Malthus, the caretaker of Boughton Estate in Oxfordshire, is threatening to enclose. When his surveyor, Jeffrey Turgoose, is shot to death and Turgoose’s young assistant badly injured, it’s easy for Malthus to blame the angry villagers. Turgoose’s friend, the coroner of Oxford, calls in Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a Philadelphia anatomist who doesn’t rely on unwarranted assumptions. But Malthus is highly displeased with Silkstone’s findings, including a clue based on a thriving moonshine operation. The American doctor has a history of discord with Malthus, who's even more powerful now that he has total control over the young heir of Boughton and the boy’s mother, Lady Lydia Farrell, is conveniently committed to Bethlem Hospital. After being turned away several times, Silkstone is finally able to visit Lydia at the institution commonly called Bedlam, where he’s horrified to find the pretty young widow he’s been courting pallid as a ghost. Worse yet, Malthus has turned Lydia against Silkstone as part of a complex plot to seize control of more than just the Boughton Estate. Silkstone’s attempts to fight back bring him into closer sympathy with the villagers and help unmask a mysterious highwayman. But even with justice, love and forensic science on Silkstone’s side, his dreams of reunion with his Lydia—and the reader’s hopes of resolution—seem dimmer than ever.
The opening of Harris’ (The Lazarus Curse, 2014, etc.) latest 18th-century romantic mystery nearly bogs down in back story. Once it gains momentum, however, one disaster relentlessly follows another for the lovelorn doctor from the Colonies.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7582-9339-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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