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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Salem Main Library | MYSTERY Boyce, T. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Boyce, T. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic (m) Boyce, T. 2016 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
On her first day as a newly minted homicide detective, Sarah 'Salt' Alt is given the cold case murder of a blues musician whose death was ruled an accidental drug overdose. Now, new evidence has come to light that he may have been given an overdose intentionally. This evidence came from a convicted felon hoping to trade his knowledge for shortened prison time. A man who Salt herself put behind bars. In a search that will take her into the depths of Atlanta's buried wounds, Salt probes her way toward the truth in a case that has more at stake than she ever could have imagined.
Author Notes
Trudy Nan Boyce received her Ph.D. in community counseling before becoming a police officer for the City of Atlanta. During her more than thirty-year career she served as a beat cop, homicide detective, senior hostage negotiator, and lieutenant. Boyce retired from the police department in 2008 and still lives in Atlanta.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Boyce draws on her experience as a retired Atlanta police officer for her uneven debut, which features Sarah "Salt" Alt, an Atlanta native and newly promoted homicide detective. Her first case is the decade-old drug overdose of blues musician Mike Anderson, reopened thanks to a tip from a convicted felon imprisoned for attacking Salt. Her investigation quickly ruffles feathers in the department as she alienates a powerful local pastor, who employs off-duty cops as security guards. A sometimes-choppy narrative, chronological inconsistencies, and a heroine too good to be true-the beautiful Salt is respected by the gang in the housing project she used to patrol, haunted by her cop father's suicide, adept at aikido, and dating a fellow detective, plus she manages to solve several high-profile homicides in the course of her first case-are balanced by Boyce's clear passion for Atlanta's people, culture, landscape, and history. Appreciation for the blues, along with magic realist elements related to the hellhound legend, add dimension to the plot. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A veteran Atlanta cop's debut novel presents a newly minted homicide detective who's struggling to keep her sights trained on the cold case she's been assigned while Atlanta seethes around her. Last year, when Sarah "Salt" Alt was a beat cop, she was shot by a man she was arresting: Curtis Dwayne Stone, a fearsome gangster who worked out of The Homes, the housing project where Salt grew up. Now that she's out of danger and working with Atlanta Homicide, their relationship's about to change dramatically. Stone, looking to slice some years off his sentence, has offered evidence that blues singer and guitarist Michael Anderson didn't kill himself with an overdose years ago; he was given "a hot pop," a dose of pure heroin, by someone he trusted. Sgt. Charlie Huff puts Salt on the old case with no partner or backup, and it's clear that she's got her work cut out for her. Stone's not exactly forthcoming with new details when she visits him in prison, and Mike's parents, still mourning their son, recoil in horror from her questions. All Salt can do is follow the trail of dubious tips that leads her to Mike's girlfriend, Melissa Primrose, his friend and band mate Dan Pyne, and homeless singer Pretty Pearl White. Her slow progress is further impeded by hints that seem to link Mike's death to the Rev. Midas Prince's Big Calling Church and the execution-style shootings of highflying lawyer Arthur Solquist's wife and daughtersa white-hot case Salt's live-in lover, Detective Bernard Wills, is working and an emphatic no-fly zone for her. Less whodunit than odyssey, as Saltclearly bent, as Wills observes, on fixing the world one sociopath at a timenavigates anti-woman prejudice in her unit, anti-cop sentiment in her hometown, and the steaming corruption that reaches from Atlanta's lower depths to its very top. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Former homicide detective Boyce presents a gritty portrait of policing Atlanta's streets that captures the contrasts between the city's underworld, surging homeless population, and the affluent. Sarah Salt Alt has been promoted to the homicide division from a beat in the Homes, one of Atlanta's most notorious housing projects. But the glow of her first day in Homicide is dulled when she's assigned to work a cold case solo, and the case hinges on the testimony of Stone, a gangster from the Homes whom she recently put away for murder. Stone alleges that blues musician Mike Anderson was dealt a hot pop of pure heroin from a local dealer who wanted him dead. Salt immerses herself in the blues scene and becomes a target when she unravels a connection between the Homes and Atlanta's hottest megapreacher, Midas Prince. Salt's character combines quick intelligence and a refreshing, confident humanity that wins allies from all walks of life, and Boyce's fluid southern voice is an alluring contrast to the stark realities she skillfully evokes.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WELCOME TO DEVIL'S POCKET, "a small neighborhood of 70 or so families pleated into the eastern bank of the river, a crimp of peeling clapboard rowhouses, asphalt playgrounds, small corner stores and brown brick buildings as old as the city of Philadelphia itself." Richard Montanari's elegiac tone takes the curse off shutter man (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), a blood-drenched thriller about a group of imperfectly domesticated boys who came from the same blighted neighborhood and grew up to become criminals and killers - and cops. Back in the day, a beloved local child was murdered, "and the world would never be the same" in Devil's Pocket. Less than a week later, Desmond Farren, the pitiable oldest son in the notoriously vicious Farren clan, was found dead, "shot once in the back of the head." Jump now to the present day and find out how those long-ago crimes still haunt the grown men whose lives were shaped by them. And pay special mind to Detective Kevin Byrne, the ethically conflicted hero of Montanari's gripping police procedurals. As one of those wild boys from the old neighborhood, Byrne would seem to have an advantage after new evidence turns up in Desmond's still unsolved murder. But when he's presented with this evidence, his impulse is to run for the hills. Meanwhile, Byrne is the lead detective on a confounding case of grotesque and seemingly random killings. From the outset, the reader knows these atrocities are actually being committed by "Billy the Wolf," one of Desmond's brothers, who has a neurological disorder that makes him unable to recognize faces. (He uses photographs to identify his targets.) While Billy sounds like a monster, he's also to be pitied. In fact, there's a lot of flawed humanity in Devil's Pocket, from that sourpuss Old Man Flagg, who owns the variety store where kids shoplift, to Angelica Leary, an exhausted, fastidious home-care nurse who "would buy breath mints before she'd buy food." Living side by side, they create a place you might call home. Or hell. WHAT'S THIS? A female cop who doesn't look like a runway model and doesn't go mano a mano with psychotic killers? Trudy Nan Boyce may be a first-time author, but she was in law enforcement for more than 30 years, which should explain why the stationhouse personnel and forensic details in OUT OF THE BLUES (Putnam, $27) feel so authentic. Her rookie homicide detective, Sarah Alt, who goes by the name of S. Alt, or Salt, is tasked with proving that Tall John, a notorious Atlanta drug dealer, sold a young bluesman named Michael Anderson the hot shot of heroin that killed him. Atlanta being a great music town, and Salt being a blues and roots fan, the narrative finds its voice when the musicians who played with Anderson in Bailey (Boss of the Blues) Brown's Old Smoke Band come to town. Like a true fan, Boyce takes us into clubs and bootleg juke joints like Sam's Chicken Shack and Blue Room and lets the music speak for itself. That high slumps when the band leaves town, but Boyce's downto-earth characters are still good company. Sadly, one of the best of them was the murdered musician, who revered the old Atlanta bluesmen and "loved, loved, loved the music." CHARLES TODD'S post-World War I mystery, no shred of evidence (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), is very much about assigning blame. Who's responsible when a banker's son is severely injured in what appears to be a boating accident? A farmer who had a hand in the rescue operation accuses the four well-born young ladies in a boating party of deliberately trying to drown him. When Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard comes down to Cornwall to investigate the charge, he finds no obvious villain - and no obvious reason for the townspeople's sense of injustice when it comes to their own personal grievances. "The war" is Rutledge's first thought when the miscreant is finally revealed. "Blame the war if you must." That makes sad sense when you consider the state of the village after its young men failed to return from France, or came back so ruined in mind and body they were unable to marry their sweethearts, tend to their farms or carry on the family business. It's that melancholy tone, the legacy of the trenches, that gives Todd's polite rural mystery such uncommon depth. AMERICANS WERE FAR from welcome in Iceland in 1979, when a young Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson was still getting the hang of homicide work. Arnaldur Indridason's introspective detective testifies to that in into OBLIVION (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $25.99), when he tells a colleague he disapproves of the giant military installation maintained by the United States Navy. "It doesn't belong here" is his concise verdict. But an investigation into the murder of a civilian flight mechanic takes him inside this unfriendly military zone, where as many as 6,000 Americans engaged in "hardship" duty live with their families in isolation from the rest of the country. "Isolation" proves a relative term, however, once Erlendur uncovers certain clandestine relationships, from love affairs to drug smuggling, linking servicemen and civilians. Although Indridason's descriptive scenes of Iceland's forbidding landscape are daunting, the big chill comes from the bad feelings between people who don't know one another, and don't want to.
Library Journal Review
Boyce is able to give listeners a lot of information about Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Department from her more than 30 years on the force, holding positions from beat cop to lieutenant. Rookie detective Sarah Alt, known to her associates as "Salt" (since her badge reads S. Alt), is given a cold case that's been reopened after new information surfaces on a possible "hot dose" heroin murder of a young blues musician. Atlanta's civilian and cop cultures mix with religion, politics, the blues, black dogs, hellhounds, and even a little voodoo. The book is given an excellent reading by Rebecca Lowman. Verdict This solidly plotted first novel is recommended for adult fiction collections. ["While there are some gripping passages, Salt never fully comes alive, and the intersecting and various story lines feel convoluted. Still, there will be strong regional demand": LJ 3/1/16 review of the Putnam hc.]-Cliff Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.