With her primary characters and general themes established (All the Secret Places, 2017, etc.), Carlisle may need to work...
A body found by a high school drug dealer becomes the center of an opiate investigation when the dealer wants to trade his charges for information.
After recovering from a spate of murder revelations, during which she helped clear her boyfriend, Jake Crosby, of criminal charges, Gin Sullivan is ready for a more low-key life in her childhood home of Trumbull, Pennsylvania. Her previous life as a Chicago medical examiner put her in close touch with death, but since she moved back, it’s all been personal. When Jake shows up at Gin’s volunteer job at a middle school, moody as always, his misery seems warranted. He’s just gotten word that his mother’s body has been found in Denton. It’s not that Jake and Marnie Bertram were close, given her ongoing struggle with opiate addiction. In fact, he hadn't seen her since he was a baby, but their estrangement makes it worse for Jake, who seems to process emotions exclusively through a push/pull of neediness and anger toward Gin. Even Jake sees his own self-destruction when he shows up for a dinner party he and Gin are hosting with high schooler Jonah Krischer, the boy who sold Marnie her fatal dose, in tow, with his hands tied behind his back. Vigilante justice is too much for Gin and Jake, so they call police chief Tuck Baxter to pick up their unwilling guest. Jonah, who as the son of a local physician has access to prescription pads, wants to swap his knowledge of where a body has been buried for a slap on the wrist in lieu of real charges. Gin feels responsible to help Tuck try to piece together the connection between Jonah, the body, and the local drug epidemic, but she fears her involvement in the case may give Tuck the idea that he can finally have her to himself.
With her primary characters and general themes established (All the Secret Places, 2017, etc.), Carlisle may need to work harder to re-create the movement and dark moods that made her earlier work so successful. Though this entry is well-done, it lacks the intensity that would justify its title.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-731-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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