THAT OLD SCOUNDREL DEATH

Name: THAT OLD SCOUNDREL DEATH
Author: Bill Crider
ISBN: 978-1-250-16562-6

by Bill Crider ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 19, 2019

Crider’s sadly final entry provides a twisty mystery and plenty of the gentle humor and quirky characters fans have come to...

bookshelf

Dan Rhodes’ last case.

The sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, has nothing against state-of-the-art forensics, but he’s found that just talking to people often gets results. Stopping to help two cars pulled over by the side of the road, he's surprised to find himself facing a pistol held by local bad boy Kenny Lambert, who’s run another man off the road while high on meth. Disarming Kenny, Dan talks to the other man, who identifies himself as Cal Stinson, a Clearview resident heading to Thurston to look at the old school building that’s the center of a major controversy among local families. Dan’s next call finds him driving to Thurston, where Wanda Wilkins has reported a dead body in the old school. The dead man told Wanda his name was Bruce Wayne, but Dan recognizes him as Cal Stinson. Meanwhile, annoyed by a gossip blog, the mayor of Clearview hires Dan’s friend Seepy Benton, a college teacher and part-time detective whose computer skills have often helped Dan out (Dead to Begin With, 2017, etc.), to identify the blogger. Seepy suspects that it's Roger Prentiss, but Prentiss reveals that he's been working with his former college roommate, Lawrence Gates, who's gone missing—and sometimes uses aliases. Lawrence seems to have been obsessed by the Thurston schoolhouse, and it turns out that he's the dead man. Wanda tells Dan that three wealthy families are involved in the school controversy: those of Charlie Reese and the Falkners, who want the school torn down, and the Hunleys, a father and son known for their heroism in several wars, who want to save it. Dan has the feeling Kenny Lambert knows something, but by now he and his friend are hiding from two other troublemakers who have it in for them. Dan soon has more problems on his hands, but he quietly pursues several leads until he has it all figured out.

Crider’s sadly final entry provides a twisty mystery and plenty of the gentle humor and quirky characters fans have come to love.

Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-16562-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | COZY MYSTERY

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAD, TO BEGIN WITH
by Bill Crider

- BOOK REVIEW
SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN
by Bill Crider

- BOOK REVIEW
BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
by Bill Crider

bookshelf

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

bookshelf

THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

bookshelf

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)