The Bitter Season

November 23, 2015
Bestseller Hoag’s riveting fifth novel featuring Minneapolis detectives Nikki Liska and Sam Kovac (after 2013’s The 9th Girl) finds Nikki transferred to the newly funded cold case unit, where she hopes more regular hours will allow her to spend additional time with her adolescent sons. Her first case lacks leads and evidence: the 20-year-old homicide of a sex crimes detective shot down in his own yard by rifle. The razor-tongued Liska attacks the case with her usual dogged persistence, despite her initial hesitation, and tracks down old witnesses in the hopes of uncovering a new direction for the investigation. Meanwhile, Sam and his new partner look into the brutal murder of a university professor and his wife—by samurai sword. The two cases ultimately collide as the body count rises. Hoag has a gift for creating dynamic suspense, three-dimensional characters, and sharp dialogue. Newcomers and fans alike will find this fast-moving police procedural intensely satisfying. Agent: Andrea Cirillo, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

December 15, 2015
In Hoag's (Cold, Cold Heart, 2015, etc.) latest, Minneapolis homicide detective Sam Kovac has been separated from his longtime partner, the diminutive yet hard-charging Nikki Liska. Nikki wanted more time with her teenage sons, so she sought assignment to the department's new cold case unit, where she's intrigued by the decades-old unsolved murder of Ted Duffy, a sex crimes detective, despite push back from a retired detective close to his family. Sam's first case without Nikki is the double murder--"raw animal violence"--of Lucien Chamberlain, an Asian studies professor, and his wife, Sondra, who were slashed to death with the professor's own antique samurai weapons. Chamberlain was an egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac. Even his adult children hated him. Son Charles is damned by OCD and his father's unachievable expectations. Daughter Diana is bipolar and hypersexual. Nikki's and Sam's cases become parallel stories of anger, isolation, ambition, violence, revenge, and perversion. With Duffy's widow married to his prosperous twin brother and reluctant to cooperate, Nikki has no lead until she discovers Evi, Duffy's long-ago foster child. Sam has too many suspects, including an ex-con working for a handyman service, Charles and Diana, and professor Ken Sato, Diana's lover and Lucien's rival for department chair. Hoag adds depth to the tale with secondary characters like the preening Sato; fragile librarian Jennifer Duffy, broken and isolated by her father's murder; and the new homicide lieutenant, Joan Mascherino, who's tough-minded and empathetic, with knife-keen intelligence hidden under a prim personality intolerant of swearing. With an ear for sardonic cop dialogue and humor--Sondra Chamberlain regularly ended her day with a "bottle of Chateau Blackout"--Hoag livens up these two already fast-paced, ripped-from-the-headlines mysteries with interesting factoids about such things as the history of female samurai. This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.

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December 15, 2015
This is the latest entry in the popular Kovac-Liska series, but the two are no longer working together for the Minneapolis police homicide unit. Detective Nikki Liska is now with the new cold-case squad in hopes of spending more time with her teenage sons. Detective Sam Kovac is lost without her but learning to deal with a young, green partner on a new case: a brutal home invasion. An Asian-studies professor and his wife were killed by a samurai sword from the professor's collection. Liska is assigned a 25-year-old murder of a highly honored sex-crimes detective, but for some reason, his family does not want the case reopened. There is no DNA, which is the primary resource to help solve cold cases, but Liska is determined to do the best she can anyway, even while envying her old partner his new case. This is a dark, gritty thriller, but Hoag manages to lighten it up now and then with some black humor. A real page-turner that is sure to please her legion of fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2015

The No. 1 New York Times best-selling Hoag brings back detectives Nikki Liska and Sam Kovac, but they're no longer partners, Nikki having departed for the relative boredom of the cold-case squad so that she could spend more time with her sons. Her case, Sam's hacked-to-bits double murder investigation, and Evi Burke's awful blast from the past make for a lot of tension.

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