Though Weaver supplies plenty of suspects, this isn’t one of her best, as it lacks the usual sexual tension.
An English couple resolves to enjoy their holiday in New York despite Prohibition and murder.
Although Milo Ames thinks their trip may be dull for both him and his wife, Amory, he’s soon proven wrong. Amory is to be a bridesmaid in her friend Tabitha Alden’s wedding, and although Tabitha’s father, Benjamin, has been rumored to be in financial difficulties, both his posh car and his grand house indicate otherwise. Once settled in, they meet Tabitha’s fiance, Thomas Smith; the other bridesmaid, Jemma Petrie; and advertising man Rudolph Elliot, a friend of Tom’s. Late for dinner is groomsman Grant Palmer, tall, dark, and handsome but with something not quite right about him. While Amory goes about her business as a bridesmaid, Milo discovers that the law against alcohol is widely ignored and samples speak-easies and gambling dens with Tom. Tabitha worries about her father’s strange behavior, and Amory’s shocked when Milo says he’s investing in Mr. Alden’s shipping business. When Palmer is shot dead on the steps of the Alden home, Amory, no slouch when it comes to solving murders (An Act of Villainy, 2018, etc.), immediately realizes that detectives Andrews and Bailey will give her nothing like the leeway that Scotland Yard’s offered her. Although Milo tries to talk her out of nosing around, she feels she must help Tabitha, who’s sick with worry over her father and horrified by the murder. So she goes to visit Leon De Lora, a well-known gangster who owns night clubs and may have a hand in far less reputable businesses. Affecting an American accent, she pretends to be a reporter hoping for a story and finds De Lora magnetic, charming, and intimidating. Milo, who’s not best pleased when he finds out, is conducting his own investigation to protect his interests. They dig up enough dirt to put them both in danger as their always dicey marital relationship keeps them pondering the future.
Though Weaver supplies plenty of suspects, this isn’t one of her best, as it lacks the usual sexual tension.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15977-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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