Bone Harvest: A Claire Watkins Mystery

by Mary Logue

Book Overview

Then the quiet was broken. The baby reached up a hand and jerked at the tablecloth. A spoon hit her on the head, and she started to cry. Bertha Schuler stuck her head out the door and called that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345462238
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Fawcett
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 1.0" x 4.3"

Customer Reviews

Thumbs up!

I really enjoyed this book. The title nearly scared me away, because I don't like "horror" books, but this was not one. It has suspense, and the title suits the story (you'll see why when you read it), but it is not gory. I have not read any of the other books in this series and did not feel I was missing anything by starting with this one. I will, however, look for another in the series to read next.

Good mystery, sad story

I like this series. If you haven't read this series, start at the first one as characters develope from the beginning. I like the way Ms. Logue weaves the past story into the present, makes it very interesting.

Buried secrets

Claire Watkins, Deputy Sheriff in Fort Antoine, Wisconsin is back. This time she is investigating a fifty-year-old murder of an entire family that came to her attention while investigating the theft of pesticide. Shortly thereafter plants and people start being poisoned and it all points back to the long ago death of the Schuler's, a farm family consisting of two parents and five young children. Mary Logue has written a very compelling story interweaving past and present. Both past and present characters were intriguing. It took a little effort to keep everyone straight, but it was well worth it. The story was suspenseful and though I found the ending to be a bit weak it did not detract from the overall enjoyment of the story.

compelling police procedural

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

A Bountiful Harvest of Chills and Suspense

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.