Too many characters and too much extraneous information pad this lackluster tale that will resonate with Clark die-hards but...
Clark follows a complicated family mystery in this familiar story of individuals caught up in past misdeeds and present tragedies.
As sisters, Kate and Hannah Connelly couldn’t be more unalike: One is tall, blonde and good with numbers, the other, short with charcoal brown hair, is a budding fashion designer. But the two sisters share more than simply the bond that comes with being siblings—they have a father who is distant, self-absorbed and disinterested in their concerns. The three are tied together by virtue of the family business, which produces high-quality antique reproductions. When the quality of the products and orders fall off, the girls pressure their father, who wants to be called by his first name, Doug, to sell out. He refuses, despite their best efforts. Then, one night, the complex explodes, killing a former employee and landing Kate in the hospital, unconscious and fighting for her life. Clark then trots out the current plant manager; the widow and daughter of the dead man; two fire marshals, along with the wife of one of them; a woman whose daughter disappeared after moving to New York City in order to become an actress and her son, who is a lawyer; the family of a college student who was murdered two years earlier; a retired police detective; Hannah’s best friend; and a plethora of other characters, all of whom are described down to their dental work. Also figuring heavily in the plot is a long-ago accident in which a boat driven by Doug Connelly sank and killed his wife, Susan, and his brother and the aftereffects of the Vietnam War. While the two fire marshals inexplicably continue to follow a case that spreads to include not simply arson, but other, more serious crimes that are not related to the explosion, the other characters find their lives and fates converging.
Too many characters and too much extraneous information pad this lackluster tale that will resonate with Clark die-hards but won’t bring new converts to the fold.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6894-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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