Paul’s a memorable lead, but it’s the largely unknown killer who makes the grandest impression.
A sheriff and his ex-detective pal chase a vindictive serial killer menacing North Carolina’s Outer Banks in this debut thriller.
Dare County Sheriff Martin Tate doesn’t have much experience with homicide. When cops find the body of nurse Lisa Utley in her ransacked home, Tate seeks help from his friend and former Ohio detective, Paul Treadwell. Paul, now running the Brown Pelican, a Duck, North Carolina, restaurant, after he and his wife, Megan, won the lottery, can offer Tate insights, having investigated more murder cases. The latest crime scene looks like a robbery gone wrong, but the woman’s photo ID lying atop an open phone book—displaying an ad for the hospital where she worked—seems suspicious. There’s also a burned CD in the stereo with only a single song. About a month later, the Treadwells’ morning beach walk is cut short by the discovery of insurance salesman Ted Blankenship’s apparently drowned body. A suicide or accident, perhaps, but back at his house are signs of a murderer’s M.O.: a phone book with Ted’s Yellow Pages ad, a newspaper article featuring the salesman, and a single-song CD. Readers know, courtesy of the killer’s perspective, that someone, motivated by payback, is meticulously stalking his prey. As the psychopath continues his killing spree, Paul and the sheriff remain dangerously unaware that the murderer’s list of impending victims includes Megan. This novel is first and foremost a mystery, not revealing the killer’s reason for vengeance or Megan’s connection to it until late in the story. Tate’s a bit of a cliché as the coffee-drinking, donut-munching sheriff, but Paul is a solid protagonist—with the smarts of an investigator and the charm of an everyday man who jokes with Megan and Pelican chef Gunny Books. The point of viewof the murderer, too, is effective; he’s terrifyingly scrupulous, and his self-appointed pseudonym, Mr. Swaylon, even gives him a personality. The good guys too easily unveil Swaylon’s true identity, but Beckett does address the killer’s ego. Swaylon’s prone to occasional bouts of stupidity, such as taunting Tate with a phone call, but, as in the case of so many serial killers, who’ll understand his vengeful rationale if he’s never caught?
Paul’s a memorable lead, but it’s the largely unknown killer who makes the grandest impression.Pub Date: April 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5304-7018-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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