Duncan’s decision to combine the talents of Daisy (Spirits Revived, 2014, etc.) and Mercy (Fallen Angels, 2011, etc.)...
A Boston Brahmin–turned–woman of the people helps solve a murder.
Mercy Allcutt left Boston to get away from her stiff, wealthy, ultracritical parents. Thanks to an inheritance, she lives comfortably in Los Angeles, where she works as a secretary for private eye Ernie Templeton. Her parents have purchased a mansion in Pasadena and ordered Mercy and her sister, Chloe, who’s married to movie mogul Harvey Mann, to come for Thanksgiving week. Mercy takes her toy poodle Buttercup, sure to annoy her mother, who dislikes dogs. A séance her mother has arranged with Daisy Majesty is attended by Mercy, Chloe, and several neighbors: the Pinkertons, Mrs. Bissel, and movie costumier Harold Kincaid. Just as they exit the séance room with perfect alibis, another guest, Mrs. Winkworth, plunges to her death from the staircase. It quickly becomes obvious that the tiny lady could not have accidentally fallen over the high railing, and everyone agrees that she was too self-centered and nasty to kill herself, so it must be murder. Daisy calls her fiance, Sam Rotondo, a detective on the Pasadena force; Mercy’s parents insist that she call her boss to come solve the crime. Several other people are less lucky in their alibis: Mrs. Winkworth’s unhappy secretary; party-crashing movie star Lola de la Monica; Harvey Mann, who has just told Lola that her contract won’t be renewed; and the Allcutts’ Japanese houseboy, who were all upstairs. Even Mrs. Winkworth’s daughter and grandson loathe her. Daisy gets to hear most of the interviews when she takes notes for Ernie. Fancying herself a detective, she discovers several clues even as she makes herself a target.
Duncan’s decision to combine the talents of Daisy (Spirits Revived, 2014, etc.) and Mercy (Fallen Angels, 2011, etc.) doesn’t strengthen the mystery, but the period details are charming.Pub Date: May 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4328-3056-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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