![]() 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. For one thing, it’s cold-a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. 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. 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. But she schemes, manipulates, and murders, eventually thwarted only when she encounters a mind as tenacious as hers.Īs one absurdist explanation follows another far-fetched plot twist, characters repeatedly tell each other to “keep an open mind.” Readers so inclined might find a reward scattered here and there.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. “Get out of my wife,” hisses frantic John at his tormenter. What mind-over-matter Mallory intends is resumption of her interrupted existence as John’s soulmate-no soul-transmigration too grotesque to contemplate. Belief first, then terror as John comes to understand the convoluted wickedness of her grand plan. Naturally, John resists so fanciful a notion, but Mallory-Eve knows too much minutiae to be doubted. Shortly after, Eve tells John she is Mallory-that is to say, Mallory in an Eve package. Eyes meet, hers the “eyes that know the souls of men.” Soon enough, she’s rattling off secrets only Mallory could have been party to. ![]() So one bright afternoon in Natchez, there’s drop-dead gorgeous Eve Sumner observing John Waters as he coaches his seven-year-old daughter’s soccer team. In actuality, Mallory, in a way incomprehensible to her (readers may also be puzzled), manages a “soul transmigration,” the first of several en route to her ultimate destination: John. A few years later, unlucky Mallory is raped and murdered. The drop-dead gorgeous Mallory has a dark side to her, however, which John cottons onto the second time she tries to kill him. While a student at Ole Miss, John Waters falls overwhelmingly in love with Mallory Gray Candler, and she with him. Huh? Well, it happens this way in the latest Iles ( Dead Sleep, 2001, etc.). Wild and wooly-headed thriller in which a settled family man confronts his homicidal first love, who is herself dead and buried.
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