An immersive and rigorous rebellion drama hampered by a plethora of details.
In this debut historical novel, designs for a revolution take shape as unrest grows in Boston.
Johnson’s story opens on the day after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when American colonists boarded ships in the city’s harbor and threw tea overboard to protest a new tax. Just after dawn, two redcoat soldiers find two faceless bodies bobbing in the water. The author carefully and meticulously examines the fallout from such events and dramatizes both sides of the rising conflict. The top brass of Britain tries to figure out how to extinguish the emergent rebel spirit. The Colonial leaders—figures such as John Adams, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock—discuss their next moves. The book features 45 chapters; each one is broken into subchapters and stamped with a date and location. Johnson’s favorite place is Snug Harbor Tavern, a pub and brothel. Disgruntled colonists meet there, but agents of Britain use the tavern, too. Zeke Teezle, one such agent, is torn between helping his fellow colonists stir up a rebellion and earning good pay from the crown for spying. The Sons of Liberty have their lofty principles, but at the tavern, colonists abide by a simpler principle: “Shaggin’ for a shillin’.” The author tries to show that the heroes of history had human desires. For example, he depicts Hancock moments after sex with a prostitute: “He was still sweating a bit from the carnal tumble they had just luxuriated in.” The novel is well researched, but Johnson’s inclusive approach to historical details bogs the book down. Every chapter is stuffed with exposition, explanations, and historical minutiae. Sometimes this urge to explain works its way into the dialogue, making it wooden and odd. At one point, Revere asserts: “Not bragging, but I’m probably the best horseman in this area; and that’s what I do…I ride.” Still, the author’s choice to set the tale in this time and place gives it an inherent energy; the work successfully depicts Boston as a pot of unrest about to boil over.
An immersive and rigorous rebellion drama hampered by a plethora of details.Pub Date: July 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5462-4990-0
Page Count: 714
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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