On the field for the Atlanta Falcons, Green once made his game look easy. But his legal thrillers make you appreciate just...
Trading beautiful, brainy, imperiled lawyer Madison McCall (Double Reverse ,1999, etc.) for beautiful, brainy, imperiled lawyer Casey Jordan isn’t enough to rescue Green’s fourth legal suspenser from the hang-ups that sank his first three.
On the eve of his trial for the ghoulish murder of his student Marcia Sales, debonair University of Texas law prof Eric Lipton abruptly dismisses his attorney and sends word to his adoring alumna Casey that she’s to replace him—though in all but name, she’ll be sitting second chair to the defendant himself. Naturally, she agrees with alacrity (first hang-up) and follows his blueprint exactly (second hang-up) by emphasizing the violent past of Marcia’s father, Donald Sales—who she suspects has already sneaked into the jail where Lipton’s being held and tried to kill him—demanding finally that he admit whether he ever had sex with his daughter (third hang-up). Winning release for her client (fourth hang-up), Casey’s beset by new problems. She’s far from certain that he’s innocent; she’s kidnapped almost immediately by grief-crazed Don Sales, though his threats don’t go as far as actual bodily harm (fifth hang-up); and her blue-blooded husband Taylor, upon her return from the kidnapping, accuses her of having an affair (sixth hang-up). Recovering enough to send Taylor packing, she acknowledges of the kidnapping: “I almost feel like I deserved it” (seventh hang-up)—a healthy acceptance of life’s vicissitudes that paves the way for more threats, more sadomasochistic revelations, more state-of-the-art handguns, and many more hang-ups, but not an ounce of surprise, before the high-caliber, low-intelligence climax.
On the field for the Atlanta Falcons, Green once made his game look easy. But his legal thrillers make you appreciate just how hard it is to create an appealing heroine, a plausible villain, original courtroom conflicts, moral ambiguities, a rising curve of suspense, and a slam-bang ending—not one of them in evidence here.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52299-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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