by Deanna Raybourn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2017
Although Raybourn’s wit and whimsy veer dangerously close to the twee, you have to admire her self-sufficient heroine, who...
An unconventional 19th-century sleuth and her equally eccentric sidekick uncover dark secrets of the upper class in this sequel to A Curious Beginning (2015).
Once Lord Rosemorran, an avid collector of natural wonders, trips over Patricia, his beloved tortoise, his fractured thigh puts paid to the South Seas expedition he’s planned with his resident natural scientists, Veronica Speedwell and the Hon. Revelstoke “Stoker” Templeton-Vane. So Veronica’s on hand to accept an invitation from Rosemorran’s sister to a society for women and a hush-hush meeting with Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter. The princess wants Veronica to use her detective skills and her discretion to clear the name of Miles Ramsforth, who will hang for the murder of his mistress, Princess Louise’s artist friend Artemisia, if Veronica doesn’t prove his innocence. If she does, she may be allowed to communicate with her father, HRH the Prince of Wales, who secretly married Veronica’s mother and abandoned them both for a royal bride. Although Veronica agrees to the task and the bait, she has her own reason for meeting the father who won’t and can’t acknowledge her. Trained in self-defense and butterfly collecting, she’s not so independent that she fails to enlist her good friend Stoker to help penetrate the artistic world Artemisia inhabited—and give Stoker the dubious honor of posing in varying states of undress for a statue of Perseus. A visit to Ramsforth’s estate includes a tour of a grotto of forbidden delights, along with a very detailed, very incriminating ledger of all the visitors to the place. Gamboling with Stoker from theater box to funeral parlor to opium den, Veronica finds not only that they’ve been too quick to eliminate a suspect, but that they have more in common than their repressed passion for each other.
Although Raybourn’s wit and whimsy veer dangerously close to the twee, you have to admire her self-sufficient heroine, who divides her attention so comfortably between lepidoptery and Victorian sexcapades.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-47615-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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