Although the idea isn’t original, the clever way McPherson (Quiet Neighbors, 2016, etc.) reveals each hint of the truth...
A Scottish woman’s psychological history causes her to question her sanity.
Ali and Marco McGovern are refugees from success. Both had flourishing businesses, but Marco’s highflying ambitions crashed, forcing them to sell everything and move with their 15-year-old son, Angelo, to a grungy cottage in Galloway, where Marco announces he’s found a possible job for Ali at Howell Hall, a mental institution looking for a beautician and art therapist. Despite having owned a beauty salon, Ali knows she doesn’t have the credentials, but she lets Marco pad her resume and is hired by Dr. Ferris for a salary large enough to make her suspicious. Marco too finds a job, but their celebrations end when a long-dead body is found at the nearby abbey. The police question Angelo, who often hangs out on the grounds, but can’t charge him because he was only 3 when the unidentified man was murdered. Now the boy's typical teen problems are compounded by a cruel joke played by a girl he fancies. Ali quickly makes friends with most of the Howell Hall staff but not the coldly efficient Dr. Ferris, who leaves the treatment of patients almost entirely to her husband. Ali’s drawn to Sylvie, a young woman who’s been almost catatonic for 15 years but seems taken with her. Another patient with a compelling story is Julia, who claims to have killed her father but seems at times almost too rational. Upset over Angelo’s problems with the police, Ali is aggravated by her husband’s and son's insistence that she keep calm and starts to have doubts about Marco’s reasons for getting her a job she is not equipped to do. She does not understand and is deeply hurt by an estrangement from her parents, which adds another layer to the mystery, and her stressful work makes her worry about her own mental problems, stemming from a breakdown 10 years ago. McPherson is a master at creating psychological tension and doubt about the motives of her characters, so it is no surprise that Ali thinks she hears sounds in her head and is constantly trying to overcome the sense that maybe she is actually going mad. The more details of her earlier breakdown become clear, the harder McPherson makes it to decide whether she’s mentally ill or being cruelly manipulated by unknown people for obscure reasons that will be uncovered in the denouement.
Although the idea isn’t original, the clever way McPherson (Quiet Neighbors, 2016, etc.) reveals each hint of the truth makes this a one-sitting read.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5216-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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