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. All the trappings, but little of the substance, of a courtroom drama.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. Instead, the one- dimensional characters spew jargon and plod their way through their stereotypical roles as if following a TV script. Brown may have found sufficient drama in tackling these issues alone. This is seen in Deb and Buzz's lack of debate over their differences on the possible abortion, inadequate exploration of pleas other than insanity, and Deb's father's refusal to testify after he fibbed during his written statement. Justice Brown may have brought to his writing some sensationalist legal scenarios from his years on the bench, but he leaves behind the scrutinizing examination and dialogue that sticky ethical issues require. Trying to get Deb off with an insanity plea, Kathleen coaches both Deb and her defense attorney, Tony Biviano, Kathleen's new, younger lover. That's it for Buzz, and Deb is arrested for his murder, so it's fortunate that she's just met the lawyer in the family. An angry Deb hurls her hair dryer at Buzz as he soaks in the Jacuzzi. Deb soon miscarries, and Buzz, while they are primping for a political dinner, accuses her of deliberately terminating the pregnancy. Deb is pregnant and may decide to abort the fetus if it carries the gene-an option rejected by her politician husband, Buzz, pro-choice on the podium and a hypocrite to his wife, who considers this an issue of dominion over her body. Successful Columbus, Ohio, lawyer Kathleen Sullivan has always known she was adopted, but it is not until she is 37 that she is contacted by her half-sister, Deb Garrison, who needs a blood sample from her to help identify the Huntington's disease gene that runs in their family. Retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Brown (Presumption of Guilt, 1991) serves up a legal thriller that fails to resolve the difficult questions it raises.
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