At its best, an engaging story of surviving tragedy with a universal, moral message.
An attempted murder and a severe beating test two people’s Christian faith and capacity for forgiveness in Louise’s debut mystery-drama.
Denise Bishop is devastated to learn that her husband, Eric, died in a fiery car accident while away on business. She’s equally shaken when she later discovers evidence that he’d been having an affair. It also looks like someone may have been trying ot kill him: previously, the manager of Eric’s boutique, Paul Parker, got shot by two men, one of whom yelled Eric’s name. Denise tries grief counseling to cope with her loss, but after she gets sage advice from her grandmother, Nana, she also wants to forgive Eric for his infidelity. Around the same time, an unidentified amnesiac who survived a brutal assault has several surgeries to reconstruct his face. After he adopts the name Edmond, he undergoes physical therapy and becomes a devout Christian. One day, a letter directs him to a bus station locker in which he finds a letter with details about his injuries and an envelope containing information about his real identity. As his memory slowly returns, he works at piecing together his past while Denise struggles to leave hers behind. Soon, their lives intersect as both seek solace and hope that guidance from God will steer them on the right course. This novel has a pronounced Christian theme but centers on notions, such as forgiveness, that are all-inclusive. For example, Nana asserts that Eric’s affair is also Denise’s fault, because she married a non-Christian, but readers of any faith will likely understand the toil of trying to forgive someone. Louise doesn’t focus on the mystery of who shot Paul, but still has fun by teasing plot twists. For example, Nana suddenly has to go to a doctor’s appointment right before revealing who saved her from a potential suicide. However, although the melodrama’s sound, the plot as a whole occasionally stumbles, particularly due to its jumbled timeline. Paul’s shooting and Eric’s death, for example, take place around September 11, 2001, but an interrogating detective asks Denise her whereabouts during March. Similarly, Paul tells the cops that he’s worked for Eric for 15 years, right before saying that he met Eric merely “several years ago.”
At its best, an engaging story of surviving tragedy with a universal, moral message.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5127-3074-6
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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