![]() 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. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. 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. Indridason (The Draining Lake, 2008, etc.) and his hero steadily improve with age.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. Meanwhile, Erlendur’s mentor Marion dies slowly in hospital his daughter Eva Lind continues on the roller-coaster of drug addiction and his relationship with crime-scene tech Valgerdur proceeds in baby steps.Ī beautifully layered mystery notable for its breadth and depth. Erlendur’s other case involves a long unsolved disappearance that springs to life again when he receives anonymous calls from a woman in distress whom he imagines to be the missing party. Since Elías’s murder, Niran has gone missing, placing him on a long list of suspects which also includes Ódinn, racist teacher Kjartan, schoolmates who reportedly sell drugs and Andres, a tightly wound young man found in possession of child porn who blames the ruin of his life on an unnamed person whom he proceeds to stalk. His mother Sunee, who works in a chocolate factory, emigrated to marry the carpenter Ódinn, from whom she’s estranged, partly because of Niran, Elías’s older half-brother, whom Sunee brought over from Thailand after marrying Ódinn. Subtle racial prejudice had made the half-Thai Elías a bit of an outcast. This murder hits inspector Erlendur especially hard because, as a child, he was unable to save his younger brother from drowning while the two were out alone. The body of nine-year-old Elías is found on a frigid January morning in a garden not far from his school. ![]() The stabbing of an immigrant child unsettles Reykjavik and its police alike.
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