It’s also definitely incomplete. This sequel probably should have been published as Part 2 of Deadly Cove (2011), which...
Lewis Cole is determined to get the anti-nuclear activist who put his best friend in a coma. And not just to send him to prison.
Lewis was on the scene at the Falconer nuclear plant when a demonstration run amok claimed three and a half lives. The half was that of Diane Woods, of the Tyler Police Department, whom Curt Chesak, leader of the Nuclear Freedom Front, beat with an iron pipe. Unfortunately, the reclusive Chesak’s guilt is a lot clearer than his whereabouts. Professor Heywood Knowlton, his friend and mentor at Boston University, sneers that he wouldn’t tell Lewis where Chesak was even if he knew. Lawrence Todd Thomas, the retired D.C. analyst whose son was another Falconer casualty, is eager to help, but he can’t locate Chesak either. So Lewis is left with no one but his buddy Felix Tinios for company as he beats the bushes looking for Chesak. But as an ex–Defense Department intelligence analyst, he’s not only ruthless about meting out rough justice, but resourceful in finding his prey. When he gets warned off the case by his sometime-girlfriend, Annie Wynn, and by Detective Pete Renzi of the New Hampshire State Police, Lewis thinks twice, but both thoughts are bloody. Unlike the Corleone family, Lewis doesn’t think it’s just business; it’s definitely personal.
It’s also definitely incomplete. This sequel probably should have been published as Part 2 of Deadly Cove (2011), which presented the Falconer demonstration up close and personal. Unless you're still as haunted as Lewis is by the events of Part 1, you may think you’re walking into the less-interesting half of a single tale.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-562-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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