A tense, engaging series mystery.
The third installment of Ferrendelli’s mystery series (Revenge is Sweet, 2013, etc.) centers on a mortuary where the bodies aren’t exactly treated with respect.
For an unassuming Denver suburb, Grandview has seen its share of problems. Not long ago, there was an illegal drug ring operating from—of all places—the Grandview Police Department. Samantha Church, the Grandview Perspective newspaper reporter who exposed the operation, then became the victim of a revenge kidnapping that also threatened the lives of her boss, Wilson Cole Jr., and her daughter, April. Now, the local Hilltop Gardens Mortuary is secretly dismembering the recently deceased and selling body parts to the highest bidders. When the demand for parts gets too high, some Hilltop workers find deadly ways to restock their supply. Sam gets a tip about this suspicious activity from Abby Love, a bright pre-med student who drives dead bodies from hospitals and nursing homes to the appropriate places. Together, the two find out that things are far worse at Hilltop than they ever imagined. When Sam loses contact with Abby and goes to look for her, she finds out just how far the people at Hilltop are willing to go to keep things quiet. All the while, Sam must also deal with her unsteady dating life and continue her fight against alcoholism as she attempts to regain custody of her daughter. Ferrendelli’s skill at developing layered, flawed characters is once again evident here. Sam, in particular, is a likably imperfect protagonist. The author also proves that she has a keen eye for thoughtful details; for example, Wilson has a prosthetic hand to replace one he recently lost, and when he puts his hands on his hips, he has “the strange sensation of being able to feel the fabric of his pants with his right hand, but not with his left.” There are a few distracting errors, such as when Sam thinks about “this terrible addition to alcohol,” but most readers will gloss over them due to the story’s fine characters and suspense.
A tense, engaging series mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1507590003
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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