Overly complicated and confusing in places but with pacing that makes the prose crackle.
Montanari’s latest thriller (The Echo Man, 2011, etc.) reunites Philadelphia detectives Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne in the hunt for an elusive killer.
Prior to his death, Detective John Garcia worked a strange and horrific murder case involving a nondescript businessman found dead in a Philadelphia park with a stake driven into the back of his head. But Garcia, suffering from an undetected brain tumor, did little to solve the case, so it sat dormant until Balzano and Byrne draw it from the cold case files. Soon, there’s another murder that’s tied into the first one, and it’s every bit as terrible and mystifying. The investigating team unearths clues that make no sense: Old photos of elderly people shown nude and performing bizarre sex acts, a box of cash, a raggedy looking man who shows up at odd moments and a very old abduction that has haunted a retired police detective for many years. While Balzano struggles to balance law school with motherhood and her job, her partner, Byrne, deals with his daughter going off to college and becoming an independent young woman, despite her deafness; but the case wreaks havoc with their private lives as it grows more and more complex. And that complexity forms the crux of the problem with this novel. Flashing back and forth between times, places, and points of view and including one massive coincidence, Montanari piles on the details, but many of them are so convoluted that they serve only to confuse readers as they also progress the storyline. In the end, when most readers will expect the case to be wrapped up, almost as many questions as answers remain, leading readers to conclude that the Philadelphia Police Department, though capable of deploying dozens of officers and two supposedly crack detectives to catch the killer, isn’t all that good at its job.
Overly complicated and confusing in places but with pacing that makes the prose crackle.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-24470-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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