A cozy grounded by realistic horrors, though the true affliction here is the untidy number of loose ends.
In this second mystery following two retiree friends with a knack for sleuthing (Death at Breakfast, 2016, etc.), a favorite teacher is found dead at a historic Hudson River Valley private school.
Don’t let the YA–inspired cover fool you. This is about how very serious and adult problems can be cultivated in the most innocent of settings. Complications are aplenty for the Rye Manor School for Girls, currently undergoing evaluation for possible closure, when art history teacher Florence Meagher goes missing. Former New York City private school head Maggie Detweiler is already on the premises as part of the evaluation, and she’s quick to start her investigation and also to tell her friend Hope Babbin what's going on. When Florence is found dead in the school’s Olympic-size pool by diving star and board-member daughter Lily Hollister, Hope leaves her book club in Boston to join Maggie on the hunt for clues. Everyone at the school is apparently aware of Florence’s “affliction”—she was incapable of shutting up—but using this as a motive for murder seems thin considering readers get only a moment’s exposure to it. Gutcheon wastes no time delving into other areas of suspicion, however, namely Florence’s marriage to her insensitive husband, Ray, whose alibi for the evening doesn’t check out. There’s also her mentorship of troubled student Jesse, who has a tendency for violent behavior. The story is brimming with people in desperate situations, from school trustees to local business owners to students at their emotional limits. This second installment is a noticeable improvement on the first in terms of character development, but as Maggie and Hope home in on the individual they feel most likely to have silenced Florence for good, major plotlines get thrown by the wayside. The secretive affairs of Rye-on-Hudson are undoubtedly compelling, but don’t expect conclusions for each downcast individual.
A cozy grounded by realistic horrors, though the true affliction here is the untidy number of loose ends.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243201-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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