The inventive, deepening twists make this comeback read like a superior episode of Law & Order: West Texas.
Police Chief Josie Gray returns after a one-book hiatus to lock horns with a survivalist cult that’s taken root in her hometown of Artemis, Texas.
Wayne Masters, who’s reinvented himself as Gideon, the charismatic leader of The Drummers, maintains that his community of some 20 adults and children, which has purchased a decrepit church building for a dollar, only wants to be left alone. But when a suspicious series of transformer fires leaves the whole town without electricity, the finger of suspicion points at The Drummers. When the deputation serving a warrant for parole violation on Drummer Clyde Hamblin arrives at the church, they’re met with gunfire. And by the time the confrontation has ended, 15-year-old Mandy Seneck is dead inside. Gideon insists she’s been shot by Josie, who returned the fire from outside, though the ballistics render his claim manifestly impossible. Ex-Marine Leon Spinner, who’s grown more and more disenchanted with his leader, is sure that Gideon has killed Mandy himself to cover his abuse of her. As The Drummers splinter into pro- and contra-Gideon factions, Josie and her force work patiently to uncover an ever spreading network of connections between The Drummers, the dealer who supplied their guns, the terrorist saboteurs of the EX-Sovereigns, who seem to be using them as pawns in their much more ambitious and nefarious plans, and Josie’s own mother, whom Josie finds connected to Gideon in a most embarrassing way.
The inventive, deepening twists make this comeback read like a superior episode of Law & Order: West Texas.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9247-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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