Huber (This Side of Murder, 2017, etc.) draws on the beauties and dangers of the mysterious moorlands to provide a fitting...
A missing heir, an estranged family, and a possible poisoner add up to a pretty puzzle for two far-from-disinterested sleuths.
July 1831. Lady Keira Darby and her husband, Sebastian Gage, have been summoned to Langstone Manor in Dartmoor by his maternal grandfather, the Viscount Tavistock, to help find Sebastian's cousin Alfred, who's gone missing. Sebastian was raised at Langstone Manor but hasn’t visited for 15 years. He has traumatic memories of his mother’s death by poisoning and of being bullied by Alfred and his brother, Rory, and disliked by their mother, Vanessa. On their arrival, they learn that Alfred’s disappeared for a day or two at a time in the past, but now he's been gone for 11 days. His grandfather’s been pressing him to marry a well-bred heiress, but Alfred, who’s always been wild, has other plans. Keira isn't surprised to be treated badly by Vanessa; after all, before she married Sebastian, she was the notorious widow of an anatomist who forced her to use her artistic talents to illustrate his textbook (The Anatomist’s Wife, 2012), quite a scandalous job for a lady. Despite her outsider status, she slowly begins to learn more about Sebastian’s family. His father, now a well-known detective, was a naval officer not thought good enough for his mother, who was not the first family member to be poisoned. While looking into Alfred's disappearance, Keira meets Lorna Galloway, the beautiful bastard daughter of a wealthy man who provides her with a cottage on the moors, where she’s known as a hedge witch. Although Lorna disclaims all knowledge of Alfred’s whereabouts, Keira is sure that she loves him and is hiding information. Because the aged viscount is gravely ill, Sebastian is determined to find Alfred dead or alive despite his dislike of his relatives—and dead seems more likely.
Huber (This Side of Murder, 2017, etc.) draws on the beauties and dangers of the mysterious moorlands to provide a fitting setting for a knotty mystery filled with envy, greed, and thwarted love.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-58722-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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