Bone Harvest (Claire Watkins, 4)

Rating:
Summary: Chilling and sad
Review: Bone Harvest is the fourth entry in the Claire Watkins series, and is the first one that I have read-but I am looking for the first three books now! The setting for Bone Harvest is a small Wisconsin farm town that does not have, or usually need, many law enforcement resources. However, fifty years ago, a brutal mass murder in an isolated farmhouse eliminated an entire family and the police never found the killer.

Using the quiet farm community with its violent history as a background, Mary Logue develops an absorbing story focusing on strange events that begin taking place shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of the crime. Pesticides stolen from the local farming co-operative reappear, first poisoning a garden, then a flock of chickens, and finally people at an outing. Claire Watkins begins to draw connections to the long ago killings when an anonymous letter writer provides hints to the local newspaper.

Carefully tying together situations from today with characters from the past, Bone Harvest leads the reader to a conclusion that is simultaneously chilling and sad. Well written, suspenseful, and demonstrating sensitivity and empathy, I would recommend Bone Harvest to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: compelling police procedural
Review: Fifty years ago in the farming area of Pepin County Wisconsin, someone killed the Schuler family murdering the parents, their four young children and a baby. Nobody was ever prosecuted for the crime but the victims were German and there was a lot of lingering resentment towards them because of what happened in WW II. Only the police and a reporter at the time know that the smallest finger from each body was cut off.

In the present, someone wants the truth about what happened on July 7, 1952 to surface. That person steals two very toxic insecticides to kill the flowers outside the sheriff office. Next he poisons a family's chickens and escalates to dumping the insecticide into lemonade being sold at the Fourth of July festivities, putting one man in a coma and hospitalizing four others. Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins races against time to catch the perpetrator before he does his big finale on July 7, the anniversary of the Schuler slayings.

There is a lot more action than in Mary Logue's previous books (GLARE ICE and DARK COULEE), but she doesn't short change her characters who are fully developed. In the middle of the investigation, the heroine's boyfriend proposes and she finds it difficult to talk about the subject because she is so focused on the case. Readers will like this genuinely good person, her lover who understands the demands of her job and Claire's young daughter wise beyond her years. BONE HARVEST is a compelling and absorbing reading experience that readers will find challenging.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: A Bountiful Harvest of Chills and Suspense
Review: The tragic death of her husband impelled Minneapolis policewoman, Claire Watkins, to flee the pressures of big city law enforcement and accept a Deputy Sheriff's position with the Pepin County PD in the rural bluff country of upstate Wisconsin. Their three years in the small farming community of Fort St. Antoine have been good ones for Claire and her young daughter Meg. Claire's gradually putting her life back together; the demands of her new job are minimal; she's even found a new love. Then one phone call changes everything. On July 7, 1952, the entire Schuler family - Bertha, Otto and their five children - was mercilessly gunned down on their isolated farm. That crime was never solved. Now, precisely fifty years later, anonymous letters to Editor Harold Peabody of the Durand Daily from an apparently Schuler-obsessed 'Wrath of God' are crying for vengeance and threatening mayhem and death. Their author starts small. Claire's originally called upon to investigate a break-in at the local Farmers' Co-op...troublesome, but nothing missing except some expensive pesticides. Then a much-loved garden is 'murdered'...a little girl's chickens are slaughtered, and, finally, a local's Fourth of July lemonade is laced with deadly poison. In each case, Unknown leaves a trail of tiny bones to mark his passage. With time running out and a madman now poised to strike at the entire community, Claire's only hope is to outthink him by reading the riddle of those bones correctly and uncovering the horrific truth behind the Schuler massacre whose consequences apparently time can neither bury nor erase. When an old photo suggests a shocking possibility, Claire goes with her gut. Once she does, the consequences of her decision will literally and figuratively blow you away.

This fourth entry in an increasingly solid series has everything going for it: most especially, a wonderfully-realized, vibrant heroine who's intensely and believably human as well as an utterly chilling 'what if' plot premise that is so skillfully developed, so logically and psychologically apt that it will linger in your memory long after Claire and her friends have restored sanity and stability to Fort St. Antoine. The book presented me with an intriguing dilemma. Its plotting is so tight...its characters, so real...the suspense, so gripping that I couldn't put it down, and, yet, the sheer lyricism of the writing made me want to slow down and savor the nuances of Ms. Logue's style. It's so good to know that she's already at work on her next Claire Watkins novel. I can hardly wait to read it.