Burke’s plot is more convoluted than necessary, and her prose more serviceable than memorable.
A novel that opens up the seamy side—is there another?—of untraceable online threats; of pay-for-sex escort services; and of murder in posh penthouses.
Burke (Angel’s Tip, 2008, etc.) reintroduces Ellie Hatcher, a tough and beautiful cop, to investigate the murder of Robert Mancini, whose bullet-riddled body has been found in a penthouse at 212 Lafayette in New York City. It turns out the apartment is owned by millionaire (billionaire?) real-estate tycoon Sam Sparks, whom characters often refer to as the Sam Sparks? (As in the Donald Trump?). When he arrives shortly after the murder, he seems more upset that Hatcher is making footprints on his designer carpet than that his employee Mancini has been murdered in his bed. Evidence abounds that a personal “escort” had been with Mancini, so she immediately becomes a suspect. Hatcher quickly gets into big trouble (and even cools her heels in the slammer for 24 hours) for suspecting that Sparks himself could be responsible for this murder, but another possibility exists—that the missing escort had been an unwilling witness and that she’s on the lam because she fears for her life. Meanwhile, NYU student Megan Gunther has been receiving threatening messages on a smarmy website, Campus Juice (“All the Juice. Always Anonymous”). When her parents go to the police precinct to get some action on these threats, they’re told that the perp can’t be traced and that anyway there’s nothing illegal about sending creepy messages. This story doesn’t go down well with the Gunthers, even more so when less than 24 hours later Megan is murdered in her apartment—though the intended victim just might have been Megan’s roommate, who we discover works for an escort service and is using an alias. Bodies continue to pile up in various distressing guises, including one that’s been tortured, but Hatcher, along with her street-smart partner J.J. Rogan, is just the one to track down the nasties.
Burke’s plot is more convoluted than necessary, and her prose more serviceable than memorable.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-156122-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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