A sophisticated, elegantly written, intensely powerful mystery, the best of an excellent series.
An upper-crust detective tackles a case that deeply affects her own family.
It's February 1935, and Dandy Gilver (Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble, 2017, etc.), her husband, Hugh, and their two sons, Donald and Teddy, have come to the remote Scottish estate of Applecross to meet the family of Donald’s intended, Mallory Dunnoch. Mallory’s mother, Lavinia, Lady Dunnoch, Viscountess Ross, is known as Lady Love. And it does indeed seem that she’s loved by all, including Donald, who clearly has a crush on her. At 30, Mallory, Lavinia’s elder daughter, is older than Donald, but Dandy comes to admire her as she gets to know her better. Lavinia’s husband, Lord Ross, has used a wheelchair ever since he was wounded during the war saving the life of the estate gardener’s son. His nurse and old pal, Dickie Tibball, is the father of Martin, who’s married to the Rosses’ younger daughter, Cherry, a partner just as devoted as Martin to managing the estate. The party assembled for Lavinia’s birthday also includes Dickie’s wife, Biddy, and Capt. David Spencer, another man in Lavinia’s thrall. Despite years of living in Scotland, Dandy’s still taken aback by local mores and frowns on Lavinia’s horticulturally rooted relationship with her gardener, Samuel McReadie, which is fueled by their mutual passion for Applecross’s stunning gardens. Although Dandy pooh-poohs several mysterious portents of danger, she agrees to wear a talisman to ward off evil. When Lavinia announces that she’s divorcing her husband and vanishes, taking her clothes and other personal property, Hugh refuses to countenance Donald's marriage and insists that his family leave the estate. No sooner have they arrived back home, however, than they’re greeted by a police inspector who announces that the unseasonable snow has melted to reveal Lavinia’s corpse in her beloved garden. The inspector is furious when the local police identify a passing tramp as her killer, a conclusion so ludicrous that Dandy and her family, joined by her fellow sleuth Alec Osborne, return to Applecross seeking the truth of a complex case steeped in folklore and family secrets.
A sophisticated, elegantly written, intensely powerful mystery, the best of an excellent series.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-473-68235-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long...
Soldier-turned-soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher goes after a serial killer in a conventionally but nonetheless deeply satisfying whodunit.
In today's armed services, you lose even when you win—at least if you're a woman who files a sexual harassment complaint. Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke were both successful in their suits, which ended the careers of their alleged harassers. But Callan and Cooke ended up leaving the service themselves, and now they're both dead, murdered by a diabolical perp who keeps leaving behind the same crime scene—the victim's body submerged in a bathtub filled with camouflage paint—and not a single clue to the killer's identity or the cause of death. The FBI hauls in Reacher, who handled both women's complaints as an Army MP, as a prime suspect, then offers to upgrade him to a consulting investigator when their own surveillance gives him an alibi for a third killing. No thanks, says our hero, who's taken an instant dislike to FBI profiler Julia Lamarr, until the Feds' threats against his lawyer girlfriend Jodie Jacob (Tripwire, 1999) bring him into the fold. While Reacher is pretending to study lists of potential victims and suspects and fending off the government-sponsored advances of Quantico's comely Lisa Harper, the murderer is getting ready to pounce on a fourth victim: Lamarr's stepsister Alison. This latest coup does nothing to improve relations between Reacher and the Feebees, all of them determined to prove they're the toughest hombres in the parking lot, but it does set the stage for some honest sleuthing, some treacherous red herrings, and some convincing evidence for Reacher's assertion that all that profiling stuff is just plain common sense.
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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