The second series entry is an especially enjoyable cozy for lovers of vintage toys and surprise endings.
Could classic comic books be a motive for murder?
Retired police chief Hank McCall and his daughter, Liz, his partner in running a toy shop in the Buffalo suburb of East Aurora, are off to the local convention center for the train and toy show. The booth next to them represents Craig’s Comics, whose owner, Craig McFadden, was Liz’s grade school nemesis and remains generally annoying. His helper, Maxine, a much more pleasant person than Craig—who’s dressed as Mr. Inferno, the superhero he created—is thrown into a tizzy when $90,000 worth of comic books go missing. Liz is dating two different men she really likes and is unable to choose between: Police Chief Ken Young, whom Hank calls when he recognizes some mobsters hanging around Craig’s booth, and restaurateur Jack Wallace, who’s visiting the toy fair with Terry, his ex-con brother. When Craig takes a flying leap off a narrow, elevated catwalk and ends up crushing a train display, Hank signs on as a temporary replacement for the ineffectual head of security. Craig survives the fall, but when he later dies in the hospital, the medical examiner labels his death murder. Liz, who’s already helped her dad solve one murder (Death of a Toy Soldier, 2016), is eager to pitch in on this one despite warnings from Hank and Ken to stay out of the investigation. Craig had a son from an affair, an autistic boy who will now inherit his comic-book estate. The boy's mother is a suspect. So are Terry; the mobsters; the former owner of the comics, who claims she was cheated; and others yet to be discovered. Once Maxine begins working part-time for Liz and helping inventory the comic store for the estate, she too is revealed as having a secret in her past. Liz and Hank have a lot of sleuthing to do before they can pluck the killer from such a plethora of suspects.
The second series entry is an especially enjoyable cozy for lovers of vintage toys and surprise endings.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68331-309-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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