Sympathetic characters, a complex plot, and a slew of details of questionable relevance.
In 1996, a wayward priest and a determined lawyer work in parallel to explain an apparent suicide in Halifax.
When Father Brennan Burke, rector of Saint Bernadette’s, awakens painfully from partying too heartily, he learns how badly he let down one of his parishioners. He was supposed to have met Meika Keller the night before, but he missed their appointment, and early that morning, her body washed up on the beach at Point Pleasant Park. Meika had no obvious reason to drown herself; she was witty and personable, a respected professor of physics at the university, a tireless patron of the arts whose marriage was apparently happy. She was also a refugee from Leipzig, from which she had escaped 22 years earlier, with tragic consequences. Meika’s widower, Commodore Hubert Rendell, Commander Canadian Fleet, and their two children are devastated by her death. The evidence from the autopsy and a witness implicates Lt. Col. Alban MacNair, who claims to have had a flirtation with Meika and who’s now charged with her murder. It’s not clear whether he wanted more or she did, but she was seen running from his car with him in pursuit, and her blood was on his glove. Attorney Monty Collins, Burke’s estranged friend, undertakes MacNair’s defense. Amid subplots about music, little history lectures, and flashbacks to an earlier installment (Though the Heavens Fall, 2018), Burke tries to figure out why a seemingly innocuous postcard from Berlin with a photo of the old Stasi headquarters sent Meika on a trip to Europe—and not for the reason she gave Rendell. A guilt-wracked Burke, hoping to make amends and trying to clear his own name, travels to Germany to learn more about the Meika he thought he knew. A surprising confession from a Canadian officer who’s been stalking Burke in Germany puts Meika in a new, disturbing, and heart-wrenching light.
Sympathetic characters, a complex plot, and a slew of details of questionable relevance.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77041-387-0
Page Count: 350
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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