A dead singer/songwriter looking for a comeback is at the center of this second case for a Hudson Valley psychotherapist-turned–antiques dealer and her big, happy, dysfunctional, non-biological family.
Janet Petrocelli (To the Manor Dead, 2010, etc.) is delighted to offer Natasha Wolfson, an “ex-semi-name” singer, $5,000 for the jewelry and junk she’s unloading in connection with kick-starting her life at 29. But her pleasure in the transaction turns sour when Natasha is found dead at the bottom of Platte Cove. Det. Chevrona Williams, of the New York State Police, is satisfied that her death was an accident, or maybe suicide while of hippy-dippy mind, since Natasha seems to have been a keen proponent of better living through chemistry. But Janet, for reasons best known to her, is convinced that Natasha was murdered and that it’s her job to identify the killer. It’s true that Natasha’s parents, pop psychology gurus Howard and Sally Wolfson, her Czech boyfriend Pavel and Pavel’s wealthy landladies, mannish Lavinia Bump and her sister Octavia, to whom Pavel instantly transfers his affections, all seem sufficiently unbalanced to have pushed Natasha off a cliff. But then so do the series regulars, from Janet’s caterer friend Abba Turner to her pal George, a gay nurse who’s always in the throes of an unwise passion, to Josie Alvarez, the teenager who helped out in Janet’s Planet until she was spirited away by a mean-spirited pair of foster parents. The mystery and its solution, sketched out rather than worked out, are mainly a pretext for introducing you to some amiable misfits, some exotic pets and Janet’s supremely gossipy narration.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7387-2317-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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