A bestselling track record and some hot sex scenarios can't mask the fact that Rosenberg's latest legal-action thriller is a clunker. When her highway patrolman husband, Hank, disappeared, probation officer Ann Carlisle came apart at the seams. Now, four years later, her 12-year-old son, David, has nightmares, wets his bed, and is eating himself into a fat slug. But Ann is beginning to get her life back. She's dating rugged, ostentatiously wealthy assistant DA Glen Hopkins, whose mama is a powerhouse judge, and though David hates him, the sex is great; they even do it in the stairwell of the courthouse. Then Ann is shot outside the courthouse, and again her world turns upside down. Ann's probationer Jimmy Sawyer, a drug dealer who saved her life, is charged with the crime and immediately smears Ann, saying they had an affair that went sour. Ann is getting harassing phone calls from a man who sounds like Hank, and she is forced to remember that her marriage was less than idyllic. Hank liked to smack her around—but did he shoot her? Ann fears she'll antagonize Glen because she's uncovered evidence that may free a rapist he's locked up, and Tommy Reed, a macho Keystone-like cop, smothers her with concern. Like assistant DA Lily Forrester of Mitigating Circumstances (1993), who kills the man she thinks raped her and her daughter, Ann is a victim who tries to go on the offensive. But her actions are obscured by her girlish, namby-pamby ways and her deference to the men she loves. Rosenberg is a former probation officer whose obnoxious promo material tells us she was raped in college and therefore knows how victims feel. She offers a glimpse into a probation officer's gritty day-to-day activities, but it's not very interesting. Cartoon characters, psychobabble, and a helpless heroine who's oblivious to the culprit right under her nose. Skip the book and wait to rent the movie on a very slow weekend. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93853-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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