There’s never much doubt who’s really behind the attacks on Ian and Martha Brewer, but Nunn, who provides enough action and...
It's 1953. Although DS Emmanuel Cooper has been reassigned from Durban CID to Marshall Square in Johannesburg, his fourth case returns him uncomfortably to his roots in neighboring Sophiatown.
Teenager Cassie Brewer was at home when two thieves broke in, beat her parents badly and drove off in the family Mercedes. And she’s certain who the miscreants were: a pair of St. Bartholomew’s College students named Kibelo Nkhato and Aaron Shabalala, whom Cassie's parents—Ian, the school principal, and Martha, a secretary at the office of land management—had entertained at dinner shortly before the assault. The first suspect provides an alibi, but the second can’t, and as the evidence against him mounts, it looks like an open-and-shut case. Emmanuel (Blessed Are the Dead, 2012, etc.) would make the arrest and turn without a second thought to his Christmas vacation if Aaron Shabalala weren’t the son of his longtime friend Zulu/Shangaan DC Samuel Shabalala. If Aaron is innocent, as he claims, why is he so determined not to cooperate with the authorities, and why is Cassie so insistent that he’s guilty? Emmanuel's temporary boss, Lt. Walter Mason, congratulates him on his great work finding the stolen car and removes him from the case; but Emmanuel keeps going, joining up with his friend Samuel and Dr. Daniel Zweigman—a Holocaust survivor he's asked to treat another victim of the thieves even though that would mean crossing the color line—to find the truth. Never mind if his defiance exposes Emmanuel’s secret liaison with a mixed-race lover, Davida Ellis, and the child he’s fathered.
There’s never much doubt who’s really behind the attacks on Ian and Martha Brewer, but Nunn, who provides enough action and suspicion to keep the pot boiling, doesn’t need much of a mystery to bring the sad racial divisions of apartheid once more into sharp relief.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1696-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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