by Barbara Allan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 29, 2014
The exploits of the ditzy heroines (Antiques Disposal, 2012, etc.) remain endlessly amusing despite the rickety mysteries...
A fashion-obsessed team of sleuthing antiques dealers takes on the Big Apple.
Vivian Borne is a bipolar 70-ish drama queen; her daughter, Brandy Borne, is the divorced, Prozac-popping owner of a blind Shih Tzu named Sushi. All three are in New York City for a comic-book convention at the Hotel Pennsylvania, where they hope to sell a Superman drawing for big bucks. Their trip has been comped by convention organizer Tommy Bufford; after a little confusion over rooms, they end up in what was supposed to be Tommy’s suite, where they scare off an intruder the first night of their stay. Things go from bad to worse when they find Tommy with an award pen sticking out of his chest. The investigating officer is the brother of Brandy’s lover, Tony Cassato, who was chief of the Serenity, Iowa, police department until entering the witness protection program when the New Jersey mob put out a hit on him. Detective Cassato, who’s heard all about the duo from his brother, gives them a stern warning not to interfere in the investigation, but that’s a forlorn hope. Telling Brandy she’s going shopping, Vivian promptly sneaks off to New Jersey with Italian food, determined to get into the Badda-Boom Club, that well-known mob hangout. Her chutzpah pays off when she manages to meet the mob boss, who’s currently ensconced in a fancy assisted living residence. In the meantime, Brandy spends time at the comics convention learning all about Tommy’s enemies and putting herself in danger when she goes after the murderer, who’s just raised the stakes by killing Tommy’s assistant.
The exploits of the ditzy heroines (Antiques Disposal, 2012, etc.) remain endlessly amusing despite the rickety mysteries they often wade through.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7582-6364-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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
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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
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
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