Dugoni brilliantly folds murders past and present into his heroine’s earlier cases and her troubled history.
The only member of the Seattle PD’s Cold Case Unit gets assigned to an ancient case with an improbably tight timeline.
The Seattle Times is about to begin marking the 25th anniversary of a series of strangulations that mysteriously ended two years after it began without a single arrest. Determined to upstage the paper, police chief Marcella Weber orders Det. Tracy Crosswhite to reopen the case, partnering her with Capt. Johnny Nolasco, the superior officer whose empty-handed heading of the original investigation marks him as anything but superior. All the mysteries of the Route 99 Killer raised back in the 1990s persist. Why did he (presumably the perp was a male) shift from prostitutes to middle-class family women with his 10th through 13th victims? Why did he carve a set of angel’s wings onto the shoulder of every one of them? And why did the killings cease as suddenly as they’d started? Recognizing that Weber has staked her out as the sacrificial lamb if she doesn’t produce results and that Nolasco will be as careful to avoid sharing the blame if the pair strike out as he will be to hog the credit if they find something, Tracy begins poring over the old records and quickly realizes that retired task-force control detective Moss Gunderson is acting unusually defensive, presumably because the force failed to follow up some promising leads and misplaced evidence about crucial discoveries. The providential reemergence of an earlier suspect who’s just beaten a prostitute convinces Nolasco and Weber that they’ve found their man, but Tracy has a bad feeling about this, and as usual, her bad feelings are right on the money.
Dugoni brilliantly folds murders past and present into his heroine’s earlier cases and her troubled history.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781662500213
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
PROFILES
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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