The heroine’s uniquely comprehensive view of both the wealthy and their help is squandered in a debut more interested in...
An English pet portraitist uses her keen perspective to probe the mysterious death of one of her rich customers.
Though she doesn’t come from wealth herself, Susie Mahl is all too acquainted with what title, family, and some money bring. In her job as a pet portrait artist, she rubs elbows with many of Spire’s oldest and most well-established families, whose word of mouth is vital to her business. She got the commission to paint Antonia Codrington’s deerhound, Situp, through her well-received portrait of a dog named Harriet some years ago. And her mastery of the niceties has made her a regular feature at Beckenstale Manor, where Lord and Lady Greengrass—Alexander and Diana—Harriet’s family, hold court. While getting to know Situp for his close-up, Susie is summoned to Diana’s side when Alexander suddenly dies on the local church grounds. Diana seeks Susie’s steadiness and support as she navigates the details of the will with her son and daughter-in-law, Arthur and Asquintha. Well understanding Diana’s inability to speak her mind about Asquintha’s fitness to take on the title and the responsibilities that will now fall on her as Diana’s rule at Beckenstale comes to an end, Susie takes on the unusual role of ad hoc lady-in-waiting, navigating Diana’s world while learning all about the associated help. Already overwhelmed by the minutiae of Alexander’s will, Susie scarcely knows how to react when it comes out that Alexander’s death may have been foul play. If only she can transition from pet portrait artist to detective, with an eye on both upstairs and downstairs, she may be the one who learns the truth about what happened to Alexander.
The heroine’s uniquely comprehensive view of both the wealthy and their help is squandered in a debut more interested in expounding the details of estate law than going beyond the predictable.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-276-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Point Blank
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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