How does attempted murder sound?”įorget about solving all these crimes the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.īox 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.Ĭassandra 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. 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. 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. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. 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. 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. 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. 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. massacre next to protect his assets?Ĭox has a fine time putting all these questions into play in this long, learned and remarkably entertaining treat, which begs comparison with the work of Patricia Highsmith.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī 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. Who is writing these notes? Who would want to harm our blameless E.G.? Whom should E.G. “You must understand,” he intones, “that I am not a murderer by nature, only by temporary design.” Ah, but someone has seen, and now neatly nibbed notes are arriving under his door and that of his intended, warning her that she had better steer clear and that he had better watch his back. does the natural thing: A bookish sort with a criminal streak a league wide, he slaughters an apparently innocent fellow in the wrong place at the wrong time. Annoyed, jealous, downright irritated, E.G. He has also been sorely wronged by the deeply class-conscious, deeply disagreeable Phoebus Daunt, who survives boarding school and all its buggeries and betrayals only to spill out Swinburnesque verse. Our dark hero, Edward Glyver, aka Edward Glapthorn, has many a grievance to lodge: He is, or at least believes himself to be, or at least professes to be-he’s a most complex fellow, and we can never be sure-a bastard in the classic sense, sired by a booming war hero whom only Aubrey Smith could play. James and anthologist of other Victorian scary storytellers, plants his pleasantly meandering story early in Victoria and Albert’s rule, a time when the old class system was fraying at the edges while hungry country folk and proletarians began to push for a bigger piece of the butterpie. Mystery writers who have taken up residence in the Victorian era have concentrated mostly on the later years, when Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London. A bibliophilic, cozy, murderous confection out of foggy old England.
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