Burke’s plot is more convoluted than necessary, and her prose more serviceable than memorable.
A novel that opens up the seamy side—is there another?—of untraceable online threats; of pay-for-sex escort services; and of murder in posh penthouses.
Burke (Angel’s Tip, 2008, etc.) reintroduces Ellie Hatcher, a tough and beautiful cop, to investigate the murder of Robert Mancini, whose bullet-riddled body has been found in a penthouse at 212 Lafayette in New York City. It turns out the apartment is owned by millionaire (billionaire?) real-estate tycoon Sam Sparks, whom characters often refer to as the Sam Sparks? (As in the Donald Trump?). When he arrives shortly after the murder, he seems more upset that Hatcher is making footprints on his designer carpet than that his employee Mancini has been murdered in his bed. Evidence abounds that a personal “escort” had been with Mancini, so she immediately becomes a suspect. Hatcher quickly gets into big trouble (and even cools her heels in the slammer for 24 hours) for suspecting that Sparks himself could be responsible for this murder, but another possibility exists—that the missing escort had been an unwilling witness and that she’s on the lam because she fears for her life. Meanwhile, NYU student Megan Gunther has been receiving threatening messages on a smarmy website, Campus Juice (“All the Juice. Always Anonymous”). When her parents go to the police precinct to get some action on these threats, they’re told that the perp can’t be traced and that anyway there’s nothing illegal about sending creepy messages. This story doesn’t go down well with the Gunthers, even more so when less than 24 hours later Megan is murdered in her apartment—though the intended victim just might have been Megan’s roommate, who we discover works for an escort service and is using an alias. Bodies continue to pile up in various distressing guises, including one that’s been tortured, but Hatcher, along with her street-smart partner J.J. Rogan, is just the one to track down the nasties.
Burke’s plot is more convoluted than necessary, and her prose more serviceable than memorable.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-156122-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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