A riveting look at the Indian boarding school system whose horrors continue to be uncovered today.
Georgia O’Keeffe takes on Nazis and the Catholic Church.
In 1936, isolationism is sweeping the U.S., and people like the fanatical priest Father Charles Coughlin are praising the Nazis and spewing hatred. Georgia’s settled at the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, far from her cheating husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and enjoying her relationship with Santa Fe Sheriff Ryan McCaffrey, who’s worried about Nazi espionage and Opus Dei, the archconservative offshoot of the Catholic church that’s giving his friend Bishop Claudio Peterson sleepless nights. During a painting trip, Georgia discovers Joseph, a frightened boy, hiding in a culvert. She brings him to her home and feeds him. He eventually reveals that he’s half Navajo and half Tarahumara, and that he was planning to run all the way to Mexico, but he ends up staying with her for several days and devouring her books. When Georgia goes to Santa Fe to see the bishop about creating a mural, she finds him hanging from a rope in the garden. Was his death suicide or murder? There are indications that he was strangled with a spiked cilice of the type that some church members use on themselves for self-mortification. Upon her return home, Joseph has vanished, leaving behind a note. Going after him, she learns that the priests and nuns who run the St. Ignatius School, where he had been sent by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, killed his sister and physically and sexually abused the children under their care. Georgia takes the opportunity to teach art at the school in order to uncover more murder and abuse. Ryan, who’s gone east to learn more about Nazi plots, returns to help Joseph uncover the grave of his sister. Everything comes to a head in a snowstorm that puts everyone in danger before good triumphs over evil.
A riveting look at the Indian boarding school system whose horrors continue to be uncovered today.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781448313860
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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