A satisfying regional mystery that mines local history.
The greed for jade sculptures drives Borg’s inventive new Owen McKenna thriller.
In this 19th volume of the series, Detective Owen McKenna reluctantly takes on a difficult client. Former firefighter Jade Jaso received a death threat. The reason? The caller claims she pushed a fellow firefighter to his death in a deadly warehouse blaze. Life has been hard for Jade recently. The same fire claimed three of her fingers, forcing her to retire. Also, the dead firefighter and his acquaintance may have sexually assaulted Jade the previous night. Jade returned home to her family’s ranch near Tahoe only to have her father, Billy, die in a mysterious accident. Then, while Owen was busy identifying suspects who might threaten Jade, she and her three horses disappear in an apparent abduction. In Billy’s glass-blowing workshop, Owen discovers a letter from President Abraham Lincoln to California Gov.-elect Leland Stanford. He and Brady Harper, a Stanford scholar, piece together that Jade’s abduction may tie into a pair of jade lion sculptures, once given to Stanford in exchange for jobs. Jade’s abductor assumes that Billy told her where the lions are hidden. Now Owen; his girlfriend, Street Casey; and Owen’s law enforcement friends must locate Jade in time. Kudos to Borg for continually finding new angles to explore about his hometown, Lake Tahoe. This time out, it starts with an 1861 letter stolen from a Pony Express rider in that area, which leads to an exploration of Basque sheepherders who worked the hills around Tahoe. Finally, there’s a cipher developed by a Greek historian thrown in for good measure. Nothing is ever obvious in a Borg mystery, and he makes the reader think. Owen and his Great Dane, Spot, take center stage; less involved are Street and Owen’s police pals. The intellectual Brady is a welcome addition. Plenty of thrills and danger unfold as Owen works to solve a 150-year-old historical mystery.
A satisfying regional mystery that mines local history.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-931296-29-8
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Thriller Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
