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THE VALUE OF DISCRETION

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A seaside mystery helps a grieving investigator get back in the game.

Sixty is the new sexy in Hatfield’s second mystery featuring Carla Harper (Tumbling in the Downdrift, 2013). Many of the beautiful Gulf-front homes in the planned community of Seaside are owned by wealthy semiretired men “and their current wives (at least second, and in some cases third).” Hollis Tyler is one of those men, and Alicia’s one of those current wives. The two have a standing Friday afternoon appointment on their patio to get frisky al fresco with their masseuses, one an athletic blonde with “a cute pout” and the other, “a tall, muscular, ebony carving.” After an anonymous sender mails the Tylers photos of their sensual senior moments, Alicia enlists Carla to track down the mysterious peeping shutterbug. Retired from the Coast Guard, Carla now heads a small security consulting business that occasionally conducts investigations. She and her late husband ran the enterprise, but since Marty’s recent death, Carla hasn’t totally committed to being back at the company’s helm, instead dwelling on her loss and spending time on her sailboat and at her beach cottage. But this new case, and another involving a wealthy teenage girl gone missing while on spring break in Barbados, gives her a renewed sense of purpose. Hatfield can bring the funny—“Carla was definitely carrying the ball, and at that hour of the morning she wasn’t carrying it that far”—and the crude: “Carla would have given her left boob for a pair of binoculars at that moment.” Often, however, the information supplied, though interesting, doesn’t advance the story, and the narrative view, primarily third person, occasionally switches to second-person mode: “[Y]ou are first struck breathless by the gorgeous vista.” Nevertheless, Hatfield’s description of the vista of Navarre Beach, Florida, is so vivid that you just might envy Carla, enjoying the white sand, the blue-green water and a local haunt’s fresh-baked cinnamon rolls the “size of her head.”


An easy-reading mystery with a focus on “seniors with benefits.”

Pub Date: June 25, 2014

ISBN: 978-1497336919

Page Count: 166

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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BADLANDS

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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