Not without its intriguing facets, but a surfeit of dull dialogue and an almost complete lack of suspense result in tepid...
It looks like a rather exotic new case for Detective Inspector Sloan of England's Calleshire Constabulary (Stiff News, 1999, etc.). Elderly Colonel Caversham, owner of Whimbrel House, has died, leaving his collection of valuable artifacts to the Greatorex Museum in Berebury. The oldest piece in his collection is the Egyptian mummy Rodoheptah, but when his wooden longcase is opened, the remains within are the newest of all, the corpse of Jill Carter, a young secretary dead only a few days. Although the mummy turns up in a closet in Whimbrel in time to be laid to rest again, traces of heroin found elsewhere in the house provide an unsettling new complication, verifying Sloan's suspicion that the murder is somehow tied into the thriving drug trade in the nearby fishing port of Edsway. Meanwhile, David Barton, who worked with Jill at the accounting firm of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby, lies unconscious in hospital, victim of a car accident. Sloan will come in for some snap lessons in money-laundering, a close look at the animal-protection reserve in the kingdom of Lasserta, and a couple of assaults on his integrity via bribes before he's able to pin down the force behind the mayhem.
Not without its intriguing facets, but a surfeit of dull dialogue and an almost complete lack of suspense result in tepid pacing and a ho-hum windup. Only lovers of the formula's most ritualistic features will want to join veteran Aird for this one.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26983-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
It’s getting to be a bigger blues band on Mosley’s stage, with Joe King Oliver now sitting in with Easy Rawlins and Leonid...
Mosley (Charcoal Joe, 2016, etc.) begins what looks to be a new series with a protagonist whose territory covers New York City’s outer boroughs—and, yes, that means Staten Island, too.
Joe King Oliver was an ace investigator with the NYPD until his roving eye helped him get framed for sexual assault. “Trouble ambushed me with my pants down and my nose open,” as he explains to an acquaintance. He is kicked off the force and thrown into Riker’s Island, where he faces the kind of demeaning and vicious attacks a jailed cop would expect from inmates until a stretch in solitary confinement and an abrupt release save his life. Eleven years later, King (as some of his friends call him) is making a living as a private eye based on Brooklyn’s Montague Street when his mundane existence is jolted by two events: a letter from a woman admitting she was coerced into setting him up years before and a case involving a radical black activist who’s been sentenced to death for killing two corrupt, abusive officers. King sees serendipity in the convergence of these two cases, believing that if he could exonerate the activist, it’d be a way of finally exorcising his rueful memories. His dual inquiries carry him from glittering Wall Street offices to seedy alleyways all over the city, and he encounters double-dealing lawyers, shady cops, drug addicts, hired killers, and prostitutes along the way. The only people King can count on are his loyal and precocious 17-year-old daughter, Aja-Denise, and an equally loyal but tightly wound career criminal named Melquarth “Mel” Frost, whose capacity for violence will remind Mosley devotees of Mouse, the homicidal thug who either helps or hinders Easy Rawlins in the author’s first and best-known series. Indeed, so many aspects of this novel are reminiscent of other Mosley books that it tempts one to wonder whether he’s stretching his resources a little thin. But ultimately it’s Mosley’s signature style—rough-hewn, rhythmic, and lyrical—that makes you ready and eager for whatever he’s serving up.
It’s getting to be a bigger blues band on Mosley’s stage, with Joe King Oliver now sitting in with Easy Rawlins and Leonid McGill. But as long as it sounds sweet and smoky, let the good times roll.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-50964-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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