![]() 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. ![]() As Diamonds go, give it, maybe, a couple of carats.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. It begins intriguingly, but then, like the great man himself, gets flabby in the middle. Better than okay, if a little overlong, for this fifth in the series. And once again the fat, sly, manipulative detective pushes his oddball charm to the limit. For admirers of this oft-decorated series (Bloodhounds, 1996, etc.), the fun is as much in Diamond the browbeater as it is in Diamond the inductive reasoner. Flimsy at first, the evidence suddenly gains substance, and somewhat to his surprise Diamond turns out to have been right all along. What’s more, he manages to connect the deaths to each other and then both to the disappearance of yet another young woman, an amnesiac. Diamond’s archrival, Detective Superintendent Wigfull, says the woman fell from the roof of the apartment building Diamond insists she was shoved-and once again he carries the day. ![]() ![]() Soon, then, there’s another dead body on hand, this time a young woman’s. Can he, in the interests of occupational therapy, convince the powers-that-be that suicide in this case is actually homicide? Resourceful bloke that he is, he pulls it off. So, naturally, the brilliant if bumptious Diamond seizes on the apparent suicide of a lonely old farmer as an opportunity. Diagnosis: hypertension caused by underwork. Stressful is what it is, and it drives Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond to an ilk he detests: doctors. It’s tough heading a murder squad when nobody’s getting murdered, and the good people of Bath persist in being good.
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