Wiprud (Buy Back, 2010, etc.) even provides a wholesome moral lesson for “others who have been framed by two insane rich...
Morty Martinez, Brooklyn’s wealthiest ex-housecleaner, returns from Bolivia for another round of criminal mischief and belly laughs.
East Hampton heiress Purity Grant has such a long record in the courts and tabloids that her mother’s widower and executor, Grab-A-Lot founder Robert Tyson Grant, might well want her dead even if her hijinks didn’t play havoc with both his health and that of his corporate balance sheet. With the connivance of Dixie Faltreau, the nubile and naughty director of the Grant Charitable Trust, Grant hires Paco Ramirez, that noted Mexican hit man, to get rid of Purity. But Paco is delayed by this and that, all lovingly detailed. The Latino whom Grant mistakenly welcomes into his confidence is none other than Morty (Feelers, 2009), who’s been sent to recover a talismanic ring that Grant stole from a dead conquistador’s severed hand back when he was a child in a La Paz orphanage. No sooner has Morty, who’s just as clueless as Grant about the mixup, arrived than conspiracies and counterplots multiply as quickly as cockroaches. Dixie, whom Morty promptly lures from Grant’s bed, turns out to have ideas of her own. So does the equally homicidal Purity, who’s signed a contract with Ultravibe Media that pays her a whopping bonus if she can stir up three scandals within a week. And let’s not forget Helena, the palm reader who swiftly realizes she can milk Grant for more than a few pesos. The whole carnival of crime is juiced by Morty’s fractured, albeit mellifluous, dialogue and the conceit that he’s submitting the whole story in sort-of-screenplay form to a Hollywood producer the night before his execution for murder.
Wiprud (Buy Back, 2010, etc.) even provides a wholesome moral lesson for “others who have been framed by two insane rich people who were hell-bent to kill each other.”Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60189-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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