A deft thriller with an important message about the lasting damage of alcohol abuse.
A young woman’s mysterious murder forces a troubled detective to come to terms with his past.
No one can figure out who killed Greta Broz. She was discovered dead in her Long Island apartment from a gunshot wound. The problem? There’s no bullet to be found. That’s not the only confounding thing about the young Hungarian immigrant’s death that Detective William Hael discovers as he investigates the crime. The victim was mild-mannered and had no enemies. But as Hael digs deeper, disturbing truths about Greta’s past surface. Her father was an alcoholic imprisoned for murder, and her uncle sexually abused her. Hael’s own father was an abusive alcoholic and the case stirs up unpleasant memories and emotions, which express themselves in a series of dreams starring baseball legend Babe Ruth. Then Greta starts appearing with Ruth in the dreams (“Could the Babe, in holding Greta’s hand, simply be saying the two of them were connected? And if they were connected, what was the tie that bound them? Was it their father’s drinking?”). The Great Bambino seems to be trying to tell the detective something important, but Hael may not get the message before the killer strikes again. This debut novel is half hard-boiled mystery, half psychological study of the lasting damage and pain caused by abusive, addicted parents. That’s not surprising given that the author is a licensed psychologist who has worked with those affected by drug and alcohol abuse, and he draws on his professional knowledge to explain how children of alcoholics learn to cope. This information, while enlightening, is occasionally a bit didactic; some passages read like excerpts from a Psych 101 textbook. The detective’s obsession with Ruth and the related dreams are an inventive way to explore the character’s psyche, but sometimes disrupt the narrative’s flow, as the action pauses while Hael recounts another strange vision. Some readers may wish the narrator spent less time dozing and more time detecting. The book’s core mystery is clever and engaging, complete with effective red herrings, colorful cops, reliably sketchy informants, and dynamic action sequences. The case wraps itself up in a satisfying way, but the resolution to Hael’s troubles with his father is a bit too pat, especially because dad only appears in person in the final pages.
A deft thriller with an important message about the lasting damage of alcohol abuse.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5148-8167-5
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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