The archaeological dig as the old dark house of period thrillers, with so much ingenuity lavished on the hyperextended...
Agatha Christie is packed off to Mesopotamia, where she narrowly misses meeting her future husband, Max Mallowan, and solves an exceptionally intricate mystery.
It's 1928. Two years after noted adventurer and Arabist Gertrude Bell got a fatal dose of barbiturates in Baghdad, the discovery of a pair of unmailed letters to her father reveals her fear that she was going to be murdered. Instead of going public with the news, Davison, of the Secret Intelligence Service, thinks it more prudent to send his friend, mystery writer Agatha Christie, to the excavation at Ur, the last place where Gertrude worked as head of antiquities in Iraq, to mingle and make discreet inquiries. Arriving at Ur after being rescued from a street thief by site photographer Harry Miller, Agatha quickly meets its principals—director Leonard Woolley, secretary Cynthia Jones, architect Lawrence McRae and his troubled nephew, Cecil, and a visiting family, railroad baron Hubert Archer, his wife, Ruth, and their daughter, Sarah—all except for the queen of the dig, Leonard’s wife, Katharine, “a Jekyll and Hyde character” subject to sudden moods and indispositions, who emerges only later. Shortly afterward, Tom, the stray cat Katharine’s adopted and loved, is killed, with every indication that his mistress was responsible. Things turn much uglier when Tom is followed in death by a human victim, and again all the evidence points to Katharine. With the authorities at least a day away, Agatha (A Different Kind of Evil, 2018, etc.) is unwillingly thrust into the spotlight as a detective in spite of herself. Although it takes many more pages and subplots and red herrings, she comes up trumps in the end.
The archaeological dig as the old dark house of period thrillers, with so much ingenuity lavished on the hyperextended finale that everyone will find something to treasure before the curtain comes down. An epilogue reveals that a surprising number of incidents and characters are drawn from history.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9745-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Washington Square Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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