There is some cheesy fun to be had here with Prohibition mobsters and politicians, but the plot and prose are pedestrian.
Lawhon (Eye of the God, 2009) offers a fictional solution to the never-solved disappearance of New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Crater in 1930, a headline story in its day.
For 38 years, the judge’s widow, Stella, makes annual visits to toast him at Greenwich Village’s Club Abbey, the mobster-owned speak-easy frequented by Joe Crater in 1930. Dying of cancer in 1969, she invites Jude Simon, the detective assigned the Crater case, to join her and tells him what really happened. Cut to 1930: Joe cuts short his visit to Stella at the couple’s Maine cottage to return to NYC alone after receiving a mysterious phone call. The Craters’ maid, Maria, coincidently married to Jude, is cleaning their Fifth Avenue apartment when she walks in on Joe’s mistress, a showgirl everyone calls Ritzi, naked in the conjugal bed. Joe warns Maria to keep her mouth shut before he and Ritzi head out. After having dinner with pal William Klein, Joe and Ritzi end up in a Coney Island hotel. When there’s a knock on the door, Ritzi hides in a cabinet under the bathroom sink while two men savagely beat Joe before taking him away. She and Klein claim they spent the night together to give each other alibis when questioned. Stella returns to NYC briefly and finds a stash of money and documents that Maria knows Jude, of all people, placed in the Craters’ bureau (but he doesn’t know she knows). Stella hides from the grand jury when it convenes. Ritzi, newly pregnant, tries to hide from the mobster who controls her. Maria and Jude hide their secrets from each other. An author’s note at the end explains who was real and who is fictional in the labyrinth of what ifs, but only Ritzi’s story (she was real, but her storyline is imagined) carries any dramatic weight.
There is some cheesy fun to be had here with Prohibition mobsters and politicians, but the plot and prose are pedestrian.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53762-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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