Nickson's latest and perhaps finest is a breathless race for the truth from start to finish.
As Britain teeters on the brink of the Boer War, the Leeds police force braces in the expectation of losing too many men just when its caseload seems impossible to manage.
The summer of 1899 is blazing hot in Leeds, adding more misery for the populace and complicating several nasty cases Superintendent Tom Harper has on his plate. His wife, Annabelle, who serves on the board of the guardians of the poor, is deeply frustrated by her inability to get the condescending men to listen to any of her ideas for improvements. The well-off are being burglarized by someone who shinnies up drainpipes while the occupants are out and helps themselves to cash and jewelry. When Harper's old friend Billy Reed, who now does his policing in Whitby, comes to town after his brother Charlie commits suicide, his visit leads to a dark and dangerous case. Reed discovers that Charlie was being squeezed by a landlord who suddenly doubled the rent on his little corner shop. An investigation reveals that shops and houses are being bought up at suspiciously low prices by the Harehills Development Company so that the son-in-law of a town councilor can build new houses. Harehills is a front for the North Leeds Company, whose lawyer is able to hide the firm’s real ownership. Charlie’s shop is trashed and his wife, Hester, beaten by two big men, possibly John and Jack Smith, an elusive pair who’ll stop at nothing. Then Hester is found dead, and an autopsy shows that she was smothered. When two of the most dishonest among the council members insist on Harper’s ouster, he and the Chief Constable suspect the councillors are involved in the vicious scheme. Another fatality chalked up to the Smiths urges the force go all out to close the case. Nickson (The Hanging Psalm, 2019, etc.) is a master at mixing social commentary with police procedurals; he digs deep into the backgrounds of his characters and highlights the inequalities so common to the Industrial Revolution while deftly handling several troubling cases.
Nickson's latest and perhaps finest is a breathless race for the truth from start to finish.Pub Date: July 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8879-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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