A fourth demonstration that even if you take Raymond Donne out of the NYPD, you can’t take him out of the criminal action in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.
When the benefit honoring attorney Marty Stover’s charitable work as founder of Bridges to Success is derailed by the guest of honor’s death, Ray is right on the scene, standing outside the men’s room where Marty, stabbed in the thigh, staggered to bleed copiously out. Ray’s namesake uncle, chief of detectives for the NYPD, is convinced that his nephew’s experience as dean at a local middle school makes him the perfect person to interview Maeve Barrett, the young coat check girl, and from that point on, Ray (Dead Red, 2015, etc.) improbably gets pulled deeper and deeper into a case he has no business touching. He phones his girlfriend, reporter Allison Rogers, to make sure she gets the scoop. He takes along his cop junkie friend Edgar Martinez O’Brien when he goes to visit Marty Stover Jr., who’s reported a break-in at his father’s office, and then, having lectured Edgar on his law-breaking folly in downloading the contents of the victim’s computer, helps himself to the fruits of the poisonous tree. He asks questions about a mysterious painting that somehow passed from the parents of Ray’s student Hector Robles to Marty’s possession and more questions about the 20-year-old case in which Marty Sr.’s client Billy Taylor pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault, incurring the well-heeled wrath of Billy’s twin, Bobby, who retired from baseball to run a string of car dealerships and sit on the board of Bridges to Success.
A child could see where many of these complications are going, but the ex-cop hero takes quite a bit longer. Maybe the NYPD didn’t lose such a great investigator with his departure after all.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8659-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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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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
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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