An energetic, resourceful procedural starring a heroine who deserves a series of her own.
Veteran TV writer and fiction collaborator Goldberg (Killer Thriller, 2019, etc.) auditions a tough, ambitious rookie LA County detective determined to ride a triple murder hard—if it doesn’t destroy her career first.
After stepping up when she was off duty to take down an action-movie star who was smacking his girlfriend around, Eve Ronin suddenly found herself catapulted to the county sheriff’s Robbery-Homicide Division, where the cases are high profile and her male peers are low tolerant. Minutes after she and Detective Duncan Pavone, her older, fatter, more dispassionate partner, shrug off a borderline killing that really belongs to the LAPD, they answer a distress call from a neighbor of aspiring actress/actual waitress Tanya Kenworth to find Tanya, her two children, and her dog missing from their Topanga house, which is awash in blood. As she’s searching the woods around the house for clues, Eve is jumped by a hairy monster she can’t even identify as human before she’s knocked out—an incident she improbably decides to keep secret from Duncan. There’s plenty of convincing evidence that the family was killed, dismembered, and taken away but no evidence that points to any particular suspect. Tanya’s ex-husband, Cleve, seems to have been hours away in Merced when his estranged family vanished, and her ex-boyfriend, Jared Rawlins, was entertaining his rebound hookup. As if determined never to be off duty again, Eve works around the clock to find and pursue new leads, but instead of impressing her colleagues, she just convinces them that she’s a ruthless careerist. Nor do her efforts sit well with her endlessly critical mother, who can’t understand why she looks so disheveled during the TV interviews that make her the face, and eventually the leader, of the investigation. At length, Eve’s tireless work identifies a suspect she arrests, but although he fits the evidence to a T, his smug self-assurance makes her worry that she’s screwed up. And she has, though not in the way she thinks.
An energetic, resourceful procedural starring a heroine who deserves a series of her own.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9380-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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