JANE AND THE WATERLOO MAP

Name: JANE AND THE WATERLOO MAP
Author: Stephanie Barron
ISBN: 978-1-61695-425-3

by Stephanie Barron ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016

Barron, who’s picked up the pace since Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (2014), portrays an even more seasoned and...

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A royal summons embroils veteran Regency sleuth Jane Austen.

Jane’s come to London to negotiate the publication of her next novel and stays to nurse her brother Henry as he recovers from a near-fatal fever. His Highness the Prince Regent’s own court physician, Matthew Baillie, helped save Henry’s life, and when word gets back to HRH of Jane’s stay in London, he bids her come work in the library at Carlton House. One doesn’t decline a prince’s invitation, but Jane gets no chance to write. Instead, she discovers Col. Ewan MacFarland twitching and retching on the library floor. She wipes his lips with her handkerchief, and he utters the words “Waterloo map” and dies. When Jane examines the handkerchief, she discovers fine evergreen needles in traces of his vomit; her brother’s personal physician suggests they might be needles of the poisonous yew. She returns to Carlton House to find a watercolor map that MacFarland hid in a book in the royal library just before he was stricken. On the back of the map is a man’s last words to his beloved, with a numerical cipher and instructions to guard the map because the emperor will have need of it. Although it won’t do Napoleon much good in his exile after Waterloo, someone values the map enough to attack Jane and stab Dr. Baillie nearly to death. Jane can think of only one man to trust with the map: the artist Benjamin West’s son, Raphael, who is also an artist and a spy for the government. The race is on to break the map’s code before whoever has already been desperate to kill for it can seize it by any means necessary.

Barron, who’s picked up the pace since Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (2014), portrays an even more seasoned and unflinching heroine in the face of nasty death and her own peril.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-61695-425-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Soho Crime

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

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COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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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)