The often amusing, infallibly precious dialogue and self-reflexive asides will remind many readers of that other James, the...
The most willfully playful installment yet in James’ increasingly playful saga of Harpur and Iles.
“This is a tale that will skip about a little as far as time is concerned,” warns the omniscient narrator during one of his many interruptions of what ought to be a straightforward investigation into the fatal shooting of private investigator Thomas Wells Hart. Actually, the narrator is being far too modest. In addition to quicksilver changes from present to past, there are even more frequent shifts in points of view. The dead man himself, in full knowledge of his impending demise, relates a good deal of the story, beginning with his seduction by Judith Vasonne, who taught Careers and Religious Studies in the school where he was a pupil, and proceeding to the ways he skulks his way into Righton Private Inquiries, then moves up the ladder until he accepts one assignment too many. As for DCI Colin Harpur and his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles (Disclosures, 2014, etc.), their baroque badinage, which never gets old, at least to them, seems to infect most of the cast, many of whom Harpur treats with some of the same baleful whimsy he once reserved for his superior. Whether he’s talking to stalwart informant Jack Lamb, who pretends he’s an art dealer, or Lamb’s mother, Alice, whose prison sentence for manslaughter doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have the best interests of her son at heart, Harpur not only affects the same heartless bonhomie he shares with Iles, but even shares confidences about his relation to his boss.
The often amusing, infallibly precious dialogue and self-reflexive asides will remind many readers of that other James, the one who wrote The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, and What Maisie Knew, without introducing a single homicide to trouble the waters.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8686-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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