Fraser showcases a delightful heroine whose own life, along with the lives of her friends and family, is consistently more...
A biographer inherits an interesting challenge that may have led to murder.
Though she’s best known as a biographer, Rona Parish also writes human interest stories for the local magazine, Chiltern Life, and she wants to make the magazine's cookery specialist, Nicole Summers, the final entry in a series on successful single mothers. During their first interview, she finds Nicole very organized and rather cold; on arriving for their second interview, she finds her dead. Rona’s artist husband, Max, and her twin sister, Lindsey, a lawyer with a string of broken romances, aren’t surprised, since Rona’s already walked into way too many murder cases (A Question of Identity, 2012, etc.). Meanwhile, Rona’s agreed to write the biography of TV presenter Gideon Ward, whose hard-charging interviews made him famous. Established biographer Russell Page was well into the project when he was killed in a car crash, and his publisher’s asked Rona to complete the job. As she sorts through the masses of papers, DVDs, and memory sticks provided by Page’s widow, she comes upon some connections that give her pause. Separate from the other material is a tape of an apparently innocuous interview with Australian Bruce Sedgwick, who inherited a chain of hotels from an uncle with the proviso that he live in England. Bruce is the employer of Patrick Summers, Nicole’s ex-husband and the prime suspect in her murder. After talking to more people who knew Page, Rona realizes that he had a more than ordinary interest in Sedgwick and wonders whether his car accident was really an accident. As she deals with her sister’s new romance, her best friend’s pregnancy, and her parents’ divorce and remarriages, Rona becomes ever more fascinated with the potentially dangerous connections between Sedgwick and other people in her life.
Fraser showcases a delightful heroine whose own life, along with the lives of her friends and family, is consistently more interesting than the circuitous murder cases she is asked to solve.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8670-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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