A worthy addition to a well-devised mystery/thriller series.
A California private investigator and his Great Dane explore the seamy underside of charities.
Philosophical sleuth Owen McKenna, aided largely by his dog, Spot, returns in this 15th volume of Borg’s (Tahoe Dark, 2016, etc.) mystery/thriller series. When the novel opens, Owen already has a personal case on his plate. His girlfriend, scientific researcher Street Casey, is being stalked by her father, Tom, who has threatened to kill her for her testimony, which sent him to prison for a long stretch. Street has refused Owen’s proffered protection, choosing instead to continue living on her own while learning self-defense techniques from him. But, having to pay the bills, Owen gets drawn into a new case involving charity scammers. The client is Douglas Fairbanks, whose parents obviously had a nasty sense of humor. The introverted, middle-aged millionaire wants Owen to find his missing, much-younger girlfriend, Isadore. The two get off to a rocky start when Owen questions Isadore’s motives: “You are suggesting that the love of my life is a con artist, a thief?” Fairbanks asks. Owen’s instincts prove correct after Isadora is found gruesomely murdered, as he discovers she earned millions off a fake charity. Soon three others connected to charity scams are similarly slain, and Owen is hunting a serial killer. All the while, he is preoccupied by the threat to Street. In Owen, a former San Francisco homicide detective, Borg has created a winning protagonist, both forthright and pragmatic. It’s a treat to see how his mind works. Owen has a dedicated partner in Spot, whom he has trained as both a search and an attack dog and who becomes a central figure in this installment. More problematic is the damaged Street, whom Owen struggles to protect while respecting her wishes. The author has provided a diverse group of believable suspects, including the son of a charity’s mark, a disabled artist, a forgetful scientist, and even Owen’s own client. Borg effectively sets all this action against the colorful backdrop of Tahoe and its visitors and citizens. The result is an engrossing whodunit that should keep readers guessing through the final twist.
A worthy addition to a well-devised mystery/thriller series.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-931296-25-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Thriller Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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