The mystery, past and present, isn’t up to much, and Haines doesn’t know any more about filmmaking than you do. But who else...
Hollywood roars into Zinnia, Mississippi, along with several less welcome blasts.
The first unexpected arrival is Frangelica "Sister" McFee, who crashes Harold Erkwell’s hitherto perfect New Year’s Eve party to announce that her bestselling book about the death of her mother is about to go before the cameras. Sarah Booth Delaney and Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, the two halves of the Delaney Detective Agency, are both scandalized and somehow reassured to see that Sister is as abrasive, combustible, and generally unbearable as ever. The highflying partners in Black Tar Productions, director Marco St. John and his cinematographer wife, former actress Lorraine St. John, soon follow with a surprising offer Sarah Booth can’t refuse. Sister’s tell-all account of Cleo McFee’s drowning after her son, Daryl, whom everyone calls Son, drove into the Sunflower River may not tell the whole story after all, especially since she has no good explanation for why Son’s body never turned up. So would the Delaney Detective Agency please accept a retainer of $10,000 to reopen their own independent investigation of the 5-year-old case? Fans of this long-running series (Rock-a-Bye Bones, 2016, etc.) won’t be surprised that what follows is not so much detective work as barely controlled chaos as Sarah Booth bounces like a pinball from her familiar, her ancestor Jitty Delaney, who this time around amuses herself by masquerading as a varied series of spies, to her almost-boyfriend, Sunflower County Sheriff Coleman Peters, to Colin McFee, Cleo’s widower, who’s torn between running a senatorial campaign by denouncing Vladimir Putin early and often and coping with the pregnancy of Susan Simpson McFee, the mistress he married.
The mystery, past and present, isn’t up to much, and Haines doesn’t know any more about filmmaking than you do. But who else would create a climactic scene of which one witness observes: “I’ve never seen a woman give birth and do a vault onto a man’s shoulders”?Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08526-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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