BONE HARVEST

Joyce Bean employs a narrative style, even in dialogue, as she methodically develops characters and creates a link between a fifty-year-old murder and the present-day theft of toxic pesticides by a perpetrator who intends to poison the water supply of a Wisconsin farming community. Logue gives us a heroine who works the small town police procedural with marked efficiency; Bean gives us her voice through a miasma of clues that unmask both the killer and the legacy of the unsolved crime. Bean maintains the energy of the plot throughout and then expertly captures the tension when Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins, in a voice so eerily calm it's impossible not to hold your breath, confronts the unmasked killer. K.A.T. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 04]