Rolling back the clock gives Black the chance to recast her heroine unencumbered by the baggage she’s accumulated over the...
Black (Murder on the Champ de Mars, 2015, etc.) looks backward to discover the origins of Aimée Leduc, detective.
In November, 1942, a line runs through the French countryside near Vichy. On one side lies Chambly-sur-Cher, in la zone libre; on the other, Givaray, under control of Maréchal Pétain. When a truck laden with Nazi gold gets mired in mud on the wrong side of the river, four Free French farmers kill four of the soldiers transporting the treasure to Portugal, stealing the loot for themselves. A fifth soldier apparently escapes. Sixty years later, an elderly man from the provinces is killed on his way home from a meal with friends in Paris, his body left under the Pont des Invalides. His daughter, Elise Peltier, asks detective Jean-Claude Leduc, a distant cousin, to find her father’s killer. But Jean-Claude is about to leave for Berlin to meet a man who can help him get Sidonie, his fugitive American wife, out of trouble with Mossad. So his 19-year-old daughter, Aimée, jumps into the breach. Frustrated with medical school and depressed to discover that Florent, her aristo boyfriend, is about to announce his engagement to another woman, Aimée is ready for new adventures. She scoops up the stray puppy her grand-père found by the river, christens him Miles Davis, and goes in search of the mysterious Suzy, who left her name and phone number on a matchbook in Peltier’s pocket from a club called LE GOGO. Along the way, she runs into a dwarf computer genius who fixes her pager. So begins the arc of Aimée’s story: the first corpse, the first clue, the first shattered love affair, the first meeting with René, her eventual partner, and the reader’s first glimpse of Leduc Detectives.
Rolling back the clock gives Black the chance to recast her heroine unencumbered by the baggage she’s accumulated over the course of the series. It’s not clear, though, where this prequel will take the franchise in the long run.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61695-678-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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