Dedicated readers may relish exploring this unusual branch of the military, but not necessarily the impersonal story in...
A suspenseful first novel from biotechnologist and nonfiction author Andrews (Body Bazaar, 2001, etc.) offers within a workmanlike plot an insiders’ look into the armed-services pathology lab.
A serial killer is on the loose, strangling and raping women and then tattooing their breasts, until the death of one high-profile victim, and friend of President Bradley Cotter himself, drives the government into action. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) handles forensics work for the military, and its arrogant new head, Colonel Jack Wiatt, assigns geneticist Dr. Alex Blake to head the “Tattoo Killer” team. Thirty-something, “beguiling” but not intellectual, the child of a Vietnam vet killed in action, Alex is a dedicated sequencer of DNA, but resentful of being forced to take on the strangler case. Alex is at loose ends after struggling through an unraveled relationship, and fed up with the sexism that seems to be endemic to her line of work. But she forges on and employs her detective powers, discovering, for instance, that the killer used a cherry-flavored condom; more difficult is demonstrating to Wiatt that she is a team player. In fact, Alex spends much of her time testifying in front of a congressional committee defending the beleaguered AFIP, where she meets the handsome bachelor congressman from Texas, David Thorne, himself on the rebound from his failed relationship with an older, divorced senator. On a hunch, Alex suggests that the armed-forces genetic pool be tested against a specimen from the killer, and the result points to Admiral Kenneth Mason, who turns out to have the same creepy tattoo on his breast. But while the DNA isn’t exact, it is overlapping—meaning a relative might be involved. Andrews attempts to bring out the human story behind Alex’s work—developing her friendship with colleague Barbara and her deaf teenaged daughter, Lana—though the author is more skillful at handling the political and technical aspects of her story, such as backroom wheeling-and-dealing in the Rayburn House Office Building.
Dedicated readers may relish exploring this unusual branch of the military, but not necessarily the impersonal story in which it’s couched.Pub Date: June 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35270-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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