Allan’s heroine seems a cinch to become sheriff despite her wild flights of fancy and her dangerous tactics in tracking down...
Can success at amateur sleuthing lead to the sheriff’s office?
Antiques dealers Vivian Borne and her daughter, Brandy, have had a great deal of luck solving a long string of murders in Serenity, Iowa (Antiques Frame, 2017, etc.). A former actress and continuing diva, Vivian’s decided to run for county sheriff against Deputy Daryl Dugan now that the current sheriff is retiring. To stock her campaign chest, Brandy suggests holding a white elephant sale that draws on their expertise in finding good items. To that end they visit Sunny Meadow Manor, an assisted living and nursing home where many of the apartments are packed with items moved from much larger homes. Even Harriet Douglas, Deputy Dugan’s aunt, gives Vivian a lovely lamp as she asks for a copy of one of her books. Running back in to deliver the book, Brandy narrowly escapes death when Harriet’s apartment explodes, killing the older woman, perhaps because she was smoking despite her use of an oxygen tank. Vivian’s gossip network is soon aflutter with rumors about Sunny Meadow: too many people dying, drugs that don’t seem to work, and a general air of neglect. Never one to shirk an investigation, Vivian goes so far as to have bunion surgery so she can spend some time there undercover. Shortly after she gets a note asking her to meet an unknown informant in the garden, her wheelchair brakes fail, and she’s lucky to escape with minor bruising and the conviction that her snooping has hit a nerve.
Allan’s heroine seems a cinch to become sheriff despite her wild flights of fancy and her dangerous tactics in tracking down a killer with a well-hidden motive.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1137-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.
“It is a dangerous time to be alive.” Indeed, as this fast-paced thriller by seasoned mysterian Pavone (The Travelers, 2016, etc.) proves.
A siren wails in Paris, a once-rare sound often heard in these times of terror. It’s gone off because a jihadi has strapped a bomb to himself and is standing in front of the Louvre, “in the epicenter of Western civilization,” waiting for his moment. But is he a jihadi? Who’s put him up to this dastardly deed, and why? That’s for Kate Moore, deep-cover CIA agent, “sidewalk-swimming in a sea of expat moms,” to suss out. Kate lives in a shadow world, so hidden away that even her hedge-fund-master husband doesn’t have a clue about what she does: “Dexter has been forced to accept that she’s entitled to her secrets,” Pavone writes, adding, “He’s had plenty of his own.” Indeed, and in the shadowy parallel world of speculative finance, he’s teamed up with a fast-living entrepreneur who wants nothing more than to become superrich and run off with his “assistant-concubine.” Hunter Forsyth is about to announce a huge deal, but suddenly he’s disappeared, whisked away by shadowy people who, by the thin strings of suspense, have something to do with that bomb across town. So does a vengeful young mom, strapped to a useless husband and bent on payback for a long-ago slight. All this is red meat to Kate, who’s tired of the domestic life, no matter how much a sham, and is happier than a clam when “running her network of journalists, bloggers, influencers, as well as drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and cops, plus diplomats and soldiers, maitre d’s and concierges and bartenders and shopkeepers.” With all those players, mercenaries, and assorted bad guys thrown into the mix, you just know that the storyline is going to be knotty, and it resolves in a messy spatter of violence that’s trademark Pavone and decidedly not for the squeamish.
A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6150-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson—and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash—a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece; her sister; her FBI lover, Benton Wesley; her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino; and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in. (Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19597-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
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