Exhilaratingly professional work by both Virgil and his creator that breaks no new ground but will keep the fans happy and...
Virgil Flowers, agreeing to check out the most minor crime imaginable in sleepy Trippton, Minnesota, finds himself in a steadily deepening pool of felonies.
You may think dognapping is no big deal, but try telling that to Winky Butterfield, whose two black Labs have been carried off by D. Wayne Sharf. As Virgil’s friend Johnson Johnson tells it, this latest theft is only part of a much larger pattern that’s riled the dog-loving citizens of Buchanan County to demand action—if not from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, then from themselves. Eager to avoid a vigilante outbreak, Virgil (Storm Front, 2013, etc.) agrees to look for the missing pooches and promptly finds a meth lab that seems like a much bigger deal, at least to the BCA. Little does he know that a completely unrelated matter is about to nudge Trippton into wholesale violence. Members of the Buchanan County Consolidated School Board, tipped off that has-been reporter Clancy Conley is about to blow the whistle on their long-running embezzlement scheme, vote to have Conley killed and then are forced under pressure from Virgil’s investigation to target ever more victims in order to cover their tracks. The school board meetings, in which cutthroat discussions of ways and means end with formal endorsements of murder that would do any parliamentarian proud, have a subversively comic edge that perfectly complements Virgil’s straight-faced attempts to turn the board members against each other by urging everyone involved to rat out everyone else as they circle the wagons in ever shrinking patterns. The meth investigation winds up quickly and quietly, but Sandford keeps one last surprise up his sleeve for the denouement of the dognapping case, and it’s a doozy.
Exhilaratingly professional work by both Virgil and his creator that breaks no new ground but will keep the fans happy and add to their number.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16237-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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