Ripley (Angels Unaware, 2008, etc.) is almost too successful in fulfilling the bespectacled detective’s ploy of making...
In his 22nd adventure, a gentleman detective takes on local politics and characters as eccentric as he is.
When Albert Campion visits the picturesque East Anglian town of Lindsay Carfax, it’s purportedly to visit Eliza Jane Fitton, his wife’s niece. His ulterior motive, however, is to nose around the town at the request of his friend, CID Superintendent Charles Luke. The town’s mysterious governing body, the Carders, dates back to the late Middle Ages and pays homage to Lindsay Carfax’s heyday as a prosperous wool-trading center. Now it’s the tourists who get fleeced, as Campion discovers when he visits the antiques store that sells his niece’s paint-to-order landscapes and the shop of an 18th-century apothecary and his weather-forecasting apparatus, the Humble Box. But the quaint half-timbered buildings belie a more modern tragedy: Two archaeology students died from a drug overdose the year before during an influx of hippies. More recently, a schoolteacher became the latest Nine Days’ Wonder when he disappeared and reappeared the worse for wear, and Eliza Jane was hurt by a booby trap meant for her artist boyfriend. A visit to Campion’s Cambridge college further educates him about the wool business and the practice of owling, or sheep smuggling. But his real focus is on secret underground passages that everyone knows about and the secret Carders whose identities are equally open knowledge. Underneath what his wife calls an Idiot-in-Search-of-a-Village expression, Campion is shrewd enough to discover the truth in Ripley's completion of a fragment left behind by Campion creator Margery Allingham’s husband, who wrote several Campion adventures in her name after she died.
Ripley (Angels Unaware, 2008, etc.) is almost too successful in fulfilling the bespectacled detective’s ploy of making himself an ineffectual nonentity. Only toward the end of this meandering, fitfully amusing, resolutely twee story does Campion become more than a sad echo of an earlier age.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8383-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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