Schaffer, a former police officer, imbues the character-driven story with realism and heart-pounding suspense.
A female cop cracks a case from the past.
Now that she’s helped solve a serial killing (The Thief of All Light, 2018), Carrie Santero has settled into her dream job as an investigator with the Vieira County DA’s office, which covers a wide region of western Pennsylvania. As the office’s only female detective, Carrie gets no respect, and when a woman is raped by a man the victim describes as a police officer, Carrie’s boss shunts her off to another, apparently safer case so she won't be investigating her fellow officers. She takes up the new case out in the boonies, but the rape is always on her mind, and she is determined to come back to it at a later time. When Liston, Pennsylvania, police chief Steve Auburn was called out by some hunters who think they’ve found a human bone, he immediately knew what he was looking at. Back in 1981, schoolgirl Hope Pugh vanished, opening a case that’s never been closed. Sent out to help, Carrie discovers a moldering box of evidence containing photos, notes, a blanket, a knife, a sock, and a teddy bear. Using modern techniques and advice from her mentor, disgraced former cop Jacob Rein, she pulls prints from the knife and finds residue on the sock that is most likely semen. Pondering a letter signed by Jacob’s uncle, Police Chief Oliver Rein, she realizes that Jacob and Hope were the same age and knew each other. Carrie visits Jacob’s dying father, Benjamin Rein, who claims to have killed more than one person. A flashback to Jacob’s childhood shows him and his best friend targeted by school bullies. Jacob was practically raised by his uncle Oliver because Benjamin, a Vietnam vet, was an alcoholic with PTSD. Jacob became so close to Hope that he was devastated when she disappeared the night he was supposed to meet her in a secret place in the woods. Back in the present, Auburn wants to write off Hope’s death as an accident, but Carrie won’t stand for that. The past that alternating chapters present reveals a far different story than official records.
Schaffer, a former police officer, imbues the character-driven story with realism and heart-pounding suspense.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1725-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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