An attention-grabbing procedural with unsettling surprises inside every snowbank.
Several odd murders test the skills of a pair of seasoned detectives.
A family man is stabbed in a burger joint for no apparent reason, and a body is found in an isolated holiday cottage. DI Costello, who’s returned to her duties with Police Scotland following a leave of absence, reunites with her longtime partner, DCI Colin Anderson, with whom she has a complicated relationship, to investigate the crimes. Anderson is happy to escape his own tense family situation and is forced by the weather to assemble an unorthodox crime-scene team which includes DC Morna Taverner, who never noticed that her husband was a drug-dealing rapist. While part of Costello’s team follows up on the burger joint murder in Glasgow, he and the rest of the team battle a road-closing blizzard to reach the remote and starkly beautiful Highland town of Glen Riske, where Charlie Priestly, a police officer’s son, has been a murder suspect ever since he returned home incoherent and covered in blood. When enigmatic PC James McIver takes Costello and company to the rental cottage in Riske Wood where Charlie found a body, they see that it's on the far side of the River Riske from the town and that the bridge has a gate that can be unlocked by the owner by remote control. When the gate is locked, the only way across the river is by the "coffin bridge": "It's a suspended coffin that you lie in and then propel yourself across the river by a pulley and a rope," McIver explains. With only Charlie's tracks visible in the snow, the detectives find a dead German man who was renting the house for the Christmas holiday, and then they find his wife, equally dead, in the garden. The cottage was supposed to have been occupied by a much disliked family, but the occupants were switched at the last minute: Could it have been a case of mistaken identity? Dogged police work, computer skills, and an ability to mine both the past and present for clues to complex relationships help the isolated team as they struggle to make sense of widely separated crimes that may be related.
An attention-grabbing procedural with unsettling surprises inside every snowbank.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8923-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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