The second in Harrison’s historical series (A Shameful Murder, 2015) paints a fascinating picture of life in Ireland as it...
The burning and looting may have subsided, but Ireland’s struggle for independence has left the city of Cork still very much on edge in the 1920s.
Reverend Mother Aquinas is shopping at the English Market for eggs for her ailing gardener when she witnesses the shooting of city engineer James Doyle. The killer appears to be Sam O’Mahony, a young reporter whose mother, a stallholder in the market, struggled to educate him for a life better than hers. Sam claims that someone dropped the murder weapon on his foot, startling him enough to pick it up in the darkness when the lights went off. Although Sam’s arrested, the Reverend Mother is inclined to believe in his innocence, since she saw his face after the murder and also spotted a trench-coated man, a hat hiding his face, who vanished before the police arrived. Luckily, the detective in charge is one of her former students, Inspector Patrick Cashman. Despite the evidence against Sam, Cashman has a certain amount of faith in the clever Reverend Mother and is willing to look for other suspects. Doyle had the reputation of being open to bribes during the city’s rebuilding, favoring those with money and political influence over the small businessmen and poor folk who lost their homes and livelihoods. As the Republicans continue to harass the remaining English forces, another of the Reverend Mother’s students, a young woman in love with Sam, plans to break him out of jail. Meanwhile, the Reverend Mother, who has highly placed connections in Cork, is using them to search for others who might have motives to kill Doyle. Her suspects cover a wide range of the social and political scale, and getting too close to the truth puts her own life in danger.
The second in Harrison’s historical series (A Shameful Murder, 2015) paints a fascinating picture of life in Ireland as it makes the painful transition to a republic. A vexing mystery and a clever sleuth cap it off.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8596-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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