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.
THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST SERIES
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. If Molly can’t figure out what happened in the past, a Christmas tragedy may strike again.Ī difficult case that evokes old-time Christmas traditions and a solution that will warm the heart.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. Winnie is thrilled, but Cedric, suspecting the girl is an imposter, asks Daniel to investigate. A knock on the door on Christmas Eve reveals a young girl claiming to be the missing Charlotte. Years ago, Winnie’s young daughter vanished from their home at Christmastime and was never found. Despite the festive preparations, all is not well at Greenbriars, where Winnie Van Aiken is unhappy with her stern father and her bossy husband, Cedric. Sullivan is visiting friends for Christmas, plunges Molly into a mystery that may just cure what ails her. A last-minute invitation to join her mother-in-law at Greenbriars, a grand mansion on the Hudson where Mrs. Back in New York with Daniel and their son, Liam, she suffers a miscarriage and finds out that their beloved ward, Bridie, may be forced to return to Ireland. Molly Murphy Sullivan has had a hard year in 1906, barely surviving the big earthquake in San Francisco ( Time of Fog and Fire, 2016, etc.), where she was spending time with her husband, a New York City cop on assignment for the U.S. Depression can’t keep an intrepid sleuth from solving crimes.