Emphasizing, as usual, ethical quiddities that most mysteries either ignore or take for granted, Smith produces another...
Though she feels blessed by her niece Cat’s ex-lover and their baby, Isabel Dalhousie’s life is anything but settled in this fourth gently probing adventure (Espresso Tales, 2006, etc.).
Here's a sticky problem for the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics: How do you deal with the resentment of your closest relative when you and her castoff boyfriend have become lovers and had a son? And it's not the only problem Isabel has to face. For one thing, she’s about to get sacked. Prof. Christopher Dove, an ambitious London academic with no use for the likes of Isabel, has persuaded the board of editors to replace her with him. And it isn’t only her post at the journal that he has an eye on; when a chance meeting throws him together with Cat, it’s clearly mutual lust at first sight. Meantime, a less urgent but more complex problem has arisen with Isabel’s dawning certainty that a painting by Andrew McInnes, who drowned eight years ago, is a forgery. What should Isabel do? Her quandary is deepened by the fact that after outbidding her at auction for the painting, lawyer/collector Walter Buie has offered to sell it to her in indecent haste.
Emphasizing, as usual, ethical quiddities that most mysteries either ignore or take for granted, Smith produces another absorbing case in which Isabel doesn’t so much detect as interfere in a quietly masterful way more frivolous sleuths can only envy.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42301-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
How's this for a story idea? A victim of her father's physical and psychological abuse survives by retreating into an alter ego who goes around seducing and killing family men. Of course, you'd need to flesh out the characters, for instance by making the survivor, tropical-fish shipper Nina Benanti, a ``lame nun'' in a ``librarian's dress,'' and the alter ego, Carmina Rivincita, an exotic chameleon devoid of emotion who picks men up in bars, takes them back to her room, spikes their drinks with lethal doses of digitalis, and then sits back to enjoy their last gasps. As a plot complication, you might have shy Nina fall in love with stammering artist Paul Zahler, her last best hope for kissing off Carmina and leading a normal, decent life, if only she can quit at, what, half a dozen killings now? And then you'd need a high-profile pair of detectives—say, criminal psychologist Kate Berman and her husband, Josh, former New York City medical examiner (Whisper...He Might Hear You, 1991), whose jocular domestic life suggests a serial killer stalked by Blondie and Dagwood. And let's not forget the sensuous set pieces that are hallmarks of books like this: ``He pictured her naked lap sprawled and open as halved fruit.'' And the surefire tricks to heat up the suspense: the killer's escalating violence! the police commissioner's time limit!! the danger to our heroine!!! Computer-plotted pulp, except that the computer isn't one of the ones that wins chess games, but one of the ones that gets you out of the shower to ask if you'd like to change your long-distance service.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-8027-3193-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Ronnie Calder and his niece Deborah Fellowes, hunting foxes one evening, startle a stranger who leaves behind a set of fingerprints—and later a stolen shotgun—that lead the pair, and Deborah's CID husband Ian, back to the two-year-old deaths of sharp-dealing car salesman Nathaniel Connerty and Daniel Graham, one of the biggest investors in Nat's schemes. Suicide and accident, said the police at the time; but if the explanation's that simple, what became of the pot of cash Nat had been packing for his imminent getaway? Could his widow Jacinthe or her old housekeeper Mary Jablinska—now rekindling her ancient affair with Ronnie after a generation's lapse—know where it is? Half whodunit, half treasure hunt, and disappointingly muffled on both counts. Newcomers to veteran Hammond's Highlands would do better to cut their teeth on Sting in the Tail (p. 988).
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13941-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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