by Tracy Buchanan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
Readers’ sympathy for Buchanan’s (The Lost Mother, 2016, etc.) suffering heroine will be sorely tried by her endless...
A news presenter makes news herself when she kills a schoolboy to defend her baby girl.
After her first day back on the job as co-host of a call-in radio show, anxious new mother Anna Graves takes her infant daughter, Joni, for a walk along the beach in her seaside village on England’s south coast. She’s already feeling threatened by scruffy teenagers when a wild-eyed boy in a school uniform runs up to her and pulls out a knife. All Anna has for protection is a long-toothed comb, but it’s sufficient to kill him in a scuffle. She’s not charged with his death, which was clearly self-defense, and when the tragedy goes public, many admire her for bravely protecting her child. But when a minor indiscretion she’d committed with a married co-worker comes to light, suddenly Anna the hero is Anna the adulterer, and her guilt about that brief incident adds to her lacerating remorse about killing the boy. He would have died anyway; he was dosed with digitalis, just like the victims of the mysterious Ophelia Killer, who 20 years earlier used the same drug on teenage boys and left their bodies floating in garden ponds surrounded by flowers. Anna’s father, an investigative reporter, had become so obsessed with the case that he threw himself from the top of their lighthouse after an argument with Anna. She’s never forgiven herself for accusing him of neglecting his family, and she has guilt to spare for telling off a bullying co-worker. Her life goes from bad to worse when speculation that she might be an Ophelia Killer copycat makes the local detective eye her with new interest. As her friends abandon her and she begins to doubt herself, her only support is from her loyal grandmother and a much less likely source. Nothing, however, prepares her for the horror when the real killer comes after her.
Readers’ sympathy for Buchanan’s (The Lost Mother, 2016, etc.) suffering heroine will be sorely tried by her endless wallowing as momentum builds toward an over-the-top denouement.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68331-163-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
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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