Cleeves (Hidden Depths, 2018, etc.) has created a masterful though not always likable detective who uses her uncanny knack...
A series of fictional plots are pressed into service as blueprints for real-life crimes at a writers’ retreat.
Vera Stanhope may be an unattractive middle-aged woman living alone in the country, but her razor-sharp mind serves her well in her job as a police inspector. Vera’s developed a friendship with her ecologically correct next-door neighbors Jack Devanney and Joanna Tobin. After Joanna takes off, leaving a note bidding Jack not to worry, Vera tracks her to the Writers’ House, a country home run by author Miranda Barton and her son, Alex, as a workshop for aspiring writers. Curiosity takes Vera to the house, whose inhabitants have already called the police after discovering a grisly murder. The dead man is Tony Ferdinand, an unpopular professor whose clout in the literary world has launched the careers of many authors. The other residents have locked Joanna in her room because she was found holding a knife near the crime scene. Joanna denies being involved but admits that she went off the meds for her bipolar disorder but went back on them just before coming to Writers’ House to explore her talents and use writing as a cathartic experience to overcome the pain of a horrible first marriage. Exploring the backgrounds of the suspects is never an easy job when people lie to protect secrets often unrelated to the crime. Aside from Joanna and the Bartons, these suspects include two tutors, academic Nina Backworth and author Giles Rickard, and two students, mild-mannered ex-con Lenny Thomas and retired police officer Mark Winterton. A second murder using a piece of fiction as a template forces Vera to dig even deeper to find the past secrets behind the present-day crimes.
Cleeves (Hidden Depths, 2018, etc.) has created a masterful though not always likable detective who uses her uncanny knack for crime-solving to identify an unexpected killer.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13572-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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