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
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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