An adrenaline-rush mystery with a love story thrown in that will leave readers ready and waiting for the series’ third.
In the second volume in Hart’s (Moving On, 2013) mystery series, a young woman stoically overcomes a difficult past with her family as they work together to solve a series of horrible crimes.
Samantha Ryan’s parents recently died. Sam’s grandparents had disowned her mother. Sam’s husband left her for her cousin. Her daughter died. Now, after a successful year of being the principal at a failing elementary school in a rough part of town, Sam is looking forward to starting a life with her truelove, Thomas, formerly a best friend to her ex. But her mother’s family throws a wrench into those plans when they ask her to come to Mexico, where they inform her they need help treating her grandmother’s leukemia. Overcoming her differences with all of them, Sam has the family move in or nearby her home in Arizona. While she sorts out her issues with her mother’s side of the family, she begins to investigate the abuse of two of her students. Her ex-husband’s parents, who sided with her in the divorce, and her paternal grandparents have always been around to support her and volunteer at her school. Her current husband’s parents pop in and out of the picture, too. After Sam realizes that the children’s abuse leads to a missing mother, the family begins to work together to protect Sam, who feels she must do whatever she can to save the children. While the soap opera–like relationships may cause a bit of confusion, Hart’s fast-paced mystery picks up right where Moving On left off. Page by page, the mystery takes on new and more heinous levels of offense as Sam finds herself once again in the middle of it all. Despite the details of her everyday life, mixed with family drama and the growing scandalous felonies, Sam manages it all with grace and confidence. Readers won’t help but be swept away by the narrative, even if some of the storylines are a bit predictable.
An adrenaline-rush mystery with a love story thrown in that will leave readers ready and waiting for the series’ third.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500792589
Page Count: 570
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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