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TITUS

A chilling, novel premise that just misses the mark.

During the critical Civil War battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in 1863, a fictional Union Army regiment is plagued by a mysterious killer.

Two years into the Civil War in the spring of 1863, the Union Army, despite suffering numerous defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee and his Confederate troops, is still spoiling for another fight. During the Chancellorsville campaign, however, a lone-wolf killer begins preying on men in one particular regiment when they wander away from camp. Now, as the army prepares for the climactic battle of Gettysburg, 2nd Lieut. Rhys and a troubled doctor named Morse join forces to find the killer before rebel bullets find them. Yocum’s (Daniel, 2009) second novel moves along briskly, divided between daily army life and the killings. Yocum obviously knows the terrain; the story is impressively authentic in its depiction of Civil War life, and even the characters’ language is realistic, e.g., “skedaddle” as a synonym for desertion. The soldiers speak in the imperfect English of uneducated farm boys, which many Civil War soldiers were. With the main-character list short but vividly drawn, readers become intimately familiar with the soldiers. An especially nice touch is the soldiers’ incredulity at the notion of a serial killer—familiar today but rare then—in their ranks, slitting men’s throats when they’re away from their comrades. There are frightening moments of suspense, as when someone who may be the killer visits both Rhys and Morse, and when soldiers looking for a secluded place to relieve themselves hear mysterious footsteps trailing behind them. Yet the novel’s conclusion, in which several main characters are rather abruptly and offhandedly discarded, doesn’t live up to the beginning. After investing in the soldiers’ lives throughout the book, readers will likely think the men deserve a more satisfying finale.

A chilling, novel premise that just misses the mark.             

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013

ISBN: 978-1482691214

Page Count: 264

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2013

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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THE WINNER

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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