A touch of intrigue, a soupçon of espionage, wrapped in tense and suspense-laden mystery.
In Taylor’s newest historical crime novel (The Scent of Death, 2014, etc.), Edward Savill, home in London after working for the American Department in New York during the Revolutionary War, must deal with a shocking personal crisis.
Savill has left government to work as a property agent for foreign investors, but then comes unexpected news from Rampton, the former American Department head: he says his niece, Savill’s long-estranged wife, Augusta, has been killed in revolutionary Paris. She’s left a 10-year-old son, Charles, father unknown, who's been brought to England and left at Charnwood, near Bath, under the care of French refugees Fournier, a former cleric who may be an atheist; Count de Quillon, who "dabbl[ed] with the Revolution when it suited his purpose"; and their physician, Dr. Gohlis. Rampton, who's chief of the mysterious Black Letter Office, tells Savill he wants him to fetch the boy, an important task because there are "elements that have to do with the safety of the kingdom and the impending war with France." Savill is a cautious, intelligent protagonist, but he turns relentless after Charles is kidnapped and taken to London. Taylor’s mystery is a true puzzler, but it’s his mastery of life in chaotic Paris and London in 1792 that dazzles, and his portrayal of Charles, who was struck mute after his mother’s killers terrorized him, is empathetic. The boy counts compulsively—"measurements make a fortress of facts that protects him as he sleeps"—and adopts an écorché, a corpse transmuted into an anatomical model, as a friend. Motives push and pull. The count claims to be Charles' father. Rampton wants an heir. Savill feels a moral obligation to the child of a woman he once loved. As characters travel across England on nearly impassable muddy, rutted roads and stop at crude inns serving chicken, chops, and sherry, Taylor offers a readable take on social mores, class interactions, and great houses populated by aristocrats "icily elegant, ambitious to the point of ruthlessness."
A touch of intrigue, a soupçon of espionage, wrapped in tense and suspense-laden mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-813135-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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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