Review by Booklist Review
The opening of Dugoni's new Detective Tracy Crosswhite procedural is at once ordinary and gripping. A young man retrieving crab pots from the chill waters of Puget Sound wonders why this one is so heavy. Then, the author understates, he saw the hand. Detective Crosswhite wastes no time finding a name for the corpse, aided by the numbers on the dead woman's surgical implants. Then Dugoni interrupts the narrative for an italicized interior monologue by . . . whom? The victim? The killer? Whatever, we're witness to a woman's life going wrong as the Galahad she married is revealed as a loser who's after her trust fund. Meanwhile, Crosswhite's investigation proceeds through levels of deceit, just as the corpse's identity grows cloudier rather than clearer. About halfway through, Dugoni introduces a long sequence we could do without. Good cops, bad cops, jerk bosses, cop turf wars, even a marriage proposal in a lighthouse, briefly diminishing the narrative energy, but hold on, it soon comes roaring back in the form of chases, double-crosses, and shoot-outs. Is the reader's likely guess about the dead girl's identity right? Well, yes. Sort of.--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Dugoni's fourth entry in his Tracy Crosswhite series, the Seattle PD homicide detective and her violent crime team search for the killer of Andrea Strickland, whose body surfaced from Puget Sound in an illegal crab pot. The investigation focuses on Andrea's unpleasant husband, Graham, the beneficiary of her insurance policy, but a shocking discovery forces Tracy and her team to discard all theories and start over again. Dugoni's success in mixing riveting police procedure with Tracy's personal thoughts is well supported by reader Sutton-Smith: her narration is crisply impersonal, faintly dusted with irony, when covering the elements of the investigation (autopsy and forensics, witness interviews, etc.), but warmer and more emotional when dealing with the team members. For chapters written as entries in the victim's diary, Sutton-Smith uses a soft, self-reproachful voice to recount the events, from childhood to bad-choice marriage, that eventually prompted Andrea to take that eventful Mr. Rainier walk. A Thomas & Mercer paperback. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Seattle Police Detective Tracy Crosswhite's fourth case takes her out of her hometown, out of her jurisdiction, and out of her comfort zone.Kurt Schill is nothing but a high school student who does a little illegal crabbing. Imagine his shock when he pulls a crab pot from Puget Sound with a dead woman stuffed inside. The corpse, identified as Lynn Cora Hoff, seems to have no history and no back story; she'd even retrieved the obligatory before-and-after photographs Dr. Yee Wu took at the time of her recent extensive plastic surgery. A series of flashbacks from a spectrally ambiguous point of view opens a window onto a darker side of the story, suggesting that the victim was actually the wife of Portland attorney Graham Strickland. And soon enough, Tracy's investigation comes to focus on Strickland, whose bride, Andrea, mysteriously vanished during the couple's climb of Mount Rainier six weeks ago. Lynn's one close friend, Devin Chambers, is unavailable to shed any light on Lynn's death, and Andrea's aunt, Patricia Orr, though she's available, is no more helpful. Even worse, Tracy faces stiff competition from Detective Stan Fields, of the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, over control of the case since Andrea Strickland went missing from his jurisdiction, and Lynn Hoff might have been killed anywhere before being stuffed into that crab pot. Tracy's vexed relationship with her boss, Capt. Johnny Nolasco, guarantees that this struggle will continue until the case is finally laid to rest. Dugoni (In the Clearing, 2016, etc.) drills so deep into the troubled relationships among his characters that each new revelation shows them in a disturbing new light. The dizzying descent from a solid, unspectacular procedural to an unholy tangle of crimes makes this his best book to date. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
