As usual, Ramsay (Standing Still, 2017, etc.) provides enough creepy characters and weird doings to give her two...
A masterly pair of Glasgow sleuths tackle two cases that become one.
DI Costello is trying to get over the sting of a case in which she was unfairly blamed for the missteps of others. Her former partner, DCI Colin Anderson, is stuck reviewing cold cases. Costello gets called out when a desperate mother whose child never stops crying returns from a quick run into a store to find her car with little Sholto inside stolen. The car is soon found, but Sholto has been replaced by a boy with Down syndrome. When the woman whose old rape case Anderson was looking into dies, the powers that be ask Anderson to see if he can convince his old college girlfriend Sally Logan, another victim of an unsolved rape, to go on television and appeal for people to speak out about victims of violent and sexual crime. Costello and social worker Deliana Despande, digging into Sholto’s disappearance, learn to their surprise that quite a few babies have recently vanished, leaving their mothers to get on with their lives—all except for Orla Sheridan, whose dead body is found in a lake. The last time Orla was recorded on CCTV was in a narrow alley near the building where Anderson's old friend Sally and her husband, Dr. Andrew Braithwaite, have their businesses. There seems to be nowhere she and a pregnant woman also caught on video could have gone. Anderson renews his friendship with Sally and Andrew while Costello and her team do everything possible to discover what happened to Orla. Old lovers, cold cases, and mistakes that cast long shadows all play a part in cases so complex that solving any one of them leaves a great deal still to be discovered.
As usual, Ramsay (Standing Still, 2017, etc.) provides enough creepy characters and weird doings to give her two protagonists fits and produce one of the strangest procedurals of the year.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8760-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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