Into each life some rain must fall—even such an enviable one as that of Louise Eldridge, the gardening maven and sometime sleuth who lives in Alexandria with her CIA husband Bill and their teenaged daughter Janie. Louise’s gardening program on PBS is losing some of its audience to a show featuring sexy newcomer Bunny Bainbridge, who’s making inroads into the profitable retail gardening market as well, nearly bankrupting Fenimore Smith’s long-established White Flower Farm. Moreover, Bunny is more than a pretty face (and so on); she’s guiding rookie First Lady Maud Anderson, a native-plant enthusiast, as she plans a formal dinner and conference for the country’s top gardeners. Louise and a slew of experts are on hand at the height of the festivities when Bunny falls to the floor, an obvious victim of poisoning. Alexandria’s head of detectives Ron Goheen and Louise’s old acquaintance Detective Mike Geraghty (Harvest of Murder, 2001, etc.) duly investigate. Louise’s reenactment of the fatal dinner scene is less than a stellar success, and it takes another death, some sitting and thinking, and some high-level risk on Louise’s part before the killer is tagged.
Yes, the plot is clumsy, the characters stilted. But when Ripley comes to gardening, she writes with knowledge and obvious love. Readers with similar interests probably won’t mind the inevitable arid patches between display plots.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57566-777-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Murder and mayhem plague a film set on a secluded island off the coast of Delaware in Little’s (Dear Daughter, 2015, etc.) sophomore thriller.
When film editor Marissa Dahl takes a job on a new film directed by the talented but temperamental Tony Rees, she’s not given a script and must sign a mile-long nondisclosure agreement. It’s not ideal, but she needs the work. Escorted by an attractive ex–Navy SEAL named Isaiah, Marissa arrives on Kickout Island to find a bustling set, headquartered at a beautiful hotel, that is cloaked in secrecy and beset with dysfunction. Once Marissa gets down to work, she realizes that picking up the slack from the previous editor, who was fired for unknown reasons, won’t be smooth sailing and that the movie is based on the real-life unsolved murder of aspiring actress Caitlyn Kelly 25 years ago on that very island. Most folks assume that an eccentric ferry captain named Billy Lyle, a friend of Caitlyn’s, was the killer, but there was never enough evidence to convict. A few people, however, think he may be innocent. Marissa sets out to discover what really happened to Caitlyn with the help of Isaiah and two intrepid, tech-savvy 13-year-olds—Grace Portillo and Suzy Koh, whose parents work for the hotel. What she finds is a dead body and a whole lot of trouble. Readers fascinated with the behind-the-scenes machinations of a movie set will be enthralled, plus there’s a frisson of romantic tension between Isaiah and Marissa, and the island setting lends some spooky atmosphere. Snippets from Grace and Suzy’s true-crime podcast, Dead Ringer, are also sprinkled throughout. Though a killer on the loose adds a fair bit of urgency in the second half, the main focus is on Little’s singular narrator. Marissa relates to the world primarily through film and considers herself anything but typical: “It’s possible I’ve spent so much time watching movies that the language of film has infiltrated some primal, necessary part of my brain. I catch myself processing my own emotions in scenes, in shots, in dialogue.”
A quirky and distinctive heroine headlines this fun and fast-paced thriller loaded with cinematic flourishes.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-670-01639-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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