A quick, enjoyable read for mystery lovers.
In his latest mystery, Cardinale (The Westside Kid, 2009) explores the intersection of violence, romance and family drama.
Julian Case is trying to get his life back on track. Since his wife’s death two years ago, he has thrown himself into maintaining his realty company and some semblance of stability for his family, which is slowly moving forward after their devastating loss. His twin daughters are busy with their own lives: Flo is finishing a degree and falling in love; Frankie, the head of her own household, is considering leaving her stable banking job to become a professional kickboxer. Julian’s son, Leo, is primed to take over the family business, even if he seems more focused on his social life than on closing real estate deals. Only Julian appears to be stuck halfway between his old and new lives. While attending a relative’s wedding in Italy, he meets Alegra, a professor who ignites the possibility of a new love and happiness. But it is not to be. Upon his return home to New Jersey, Julian finds Leo unconscious and bleeding, having been beaten at some point during a party held in his father’s absence (and without permission). Leo falls into a coma, leaving Julian to help solve the mystery of why anyone would want to harm his son and to re-evaluate his own life. Through investigating Leo’s attack, Cardinale explores how losing their matriarch redefined this family’s dynamics as well as Julian’s simultaneous feelings of hope and guilt about the prospect of finally moving on. Although less developed than romantically minded readers might like, Julian’s internal struggle keeps the Alegra subplot at the fore, and Cardinale interweaves it nicely with Leo’s attempted murder. Solid dialogue gives the reader a strong sense of the characters’ personalities, especially that of Leo, who, while central to the mystery, is unconscious for most of the story. But Cardinale occasionally dips into overzealous, descriptive meanderings, as with a scene involving Alegra and her young daughter. Alegra “turned on the radio for some soft music while she prepared dinner. Caprice was in the living room playing a word game on the iPad.” Such additions feel like unnecessary padding to an otherwise strong story.
A quick, enjoyable read for mystery lovers.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478704966
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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