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WHAT THE DEAD LEAVE BEHIND

The hero emerges with his virtue intact and a brace of new heads for his trophy wall. The surprising number of malefactors...

Rushmore McKenzie, who isn’t a cop any more, and isn’t a licensed investigator either, nonetheless agrees to take his 14th case for a friend of his lover’s daughter and finds himself digging up felonies past and present.

Malcolm Harris doesn’t want anybody to go to jail for his father’s murder a year ago; he just wants to know the truth about what happened. So McKenzie, who’s a pushover for his girlfriend Nina Truhler’s daughter, Erica, promises to ask questions about Frank Harris, who was stabbed in the head and dumped in New Brighton’s Long Lake Regional Park, which might have seemed to be comfortably outside Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Assessing the suspects, Detective Clark Downing assures McKenzie, “Jayne didn’t stab him, but I know she had it done.” Unfortunately, the widow can produce no less than 14 alibi witnesses, members of the New Brighton Hotdish group who were dining with her while her husband was getting killed. McKenzie, not one to take his marching orders from the local police (Stealing the Countess, 2016, etc.), soon links the Harris killing to two earlier murders, and one of them, the shooting two years ago of cosmetics heir Jonathan Szereto Jr., encourages him to look a lot more closely at the Szereto Corporation, where Harris worked as director of Human Relations. It turns out that the corporation, and its late president in particular, has been relating to its employees less than humanely, and it’s a distinct pleasure to follow McKenzie as he uncovers layer upon layer of corporate corruption, from sexual harassment to industrial espionage, while every second woman in the cast comes on to him.

The hero emerges with his virtue intact and a brace of new heads for his trophy wall. The surprising number of malefactors at the company isn’t a strength of the tale, but they’re all well worth your cathartic scorn.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-250-09451-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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THE WINNER

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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