An often engaging New Orleans mystery with romantic and humorous touches.
In Sharma’s debut mystery, an unexpected inheritance brings a young woman to New Orleans, where she confronts a tangled legacy of family secrets.
Tess Parnell receives a mysterious letter in the mail informing her of a surprise windfall. It couldn’t come at a better time; in the last six months, she lost her school librarian job, her boyfriend dumped her, and her mother committed suicide. The letter, from a New Orleans law firm, says that she’s inherited some land in that city; the firm also represents an oil company that wants to buy the land from her. Tess decides to travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans to check things out and evaluate the firm’s $500,000 offer. It also gives her the chance to investigate her family history, about which she knows almost nothing; a yellowed newspaper clipping included in the law firm’s packet, for example, informs her for the first time that her grandfather was murdered many years ago. As she tracks down further clues, she meets several exciting and varied men while also enjoying New Orleans’ food, music, sights and unique atmosphere. Every step closer to the truth, however, brings her that much closer to danger. Sharma portrays New Orleans as beautiful, corrupt, complicated, secretive and tragic—far more than just an atmospheric backdrop for Tess’ genealogical investigations. She skillfully shows how the family betrayals, murders, lies and vengeance Tess uncovers are inextricably linked with New Orleans’ history, racial and sexual politics, and geography. The author handles dialogue (and dialect) well, which gives vitality to her large, varied cast, and she depicts Tess herself as likable, enterprising and sympathetic. However, the complicated family relationships, dating back several generations, may be hard for some readers to follow, and the frequent genealogical discussions become oppressive at times, even with the chart provided (which is difficult to read on an e-reader). At such points, the action sometimes bogs down, and more charts might have been helpful to illustrate some of the tangled relationships. That said, Sharma paces the novel well, gradually unfolding layers of mystery until the final truth is revealed.
An often engaging New Orleans mystery with romantic and humorous touches.Pub Date: May 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482786262
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2013
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
