Lots of sex and booze, and perhaps half-a-dozen too many mentions of Lucky’s Hermès Birkin handbag, but this installment is...
A prize fight, a pop star and a virginity auction. Could we be anywhere else but Las Vegas?
It’s an ordinary week at the Babylon, Vegas’s glitziest hotel. All Lucky O’Toole, head of Customer Relations, has to deal with are an entomology conference after half the bees buzzed off when their transport overturned, a middleweight title fight that marks the last hurrah of a boxer with 15 kids and counting, a naked D.A. lurking in a laundry closet while his wife and an odds-maker entertain themselves in Room 12410, and her boyfriend Teddie heading to Los Angeles to jump-start his music career by signing on as the opening act for pop tart Reza Pashiri. Sure, there are problems, but nothing compared to the brouhaha that ensues when the odds-maker, Numbers Neidermeyer, becomes the late-night snack in the hotel’s shark pool and Lucky’s assistant’s lover, a local p.i., becomes the main suspect. Along the way, Lucky gets one guy off the hook for murder, watches the D.A.’s wife take a header off the hotel roof and decides to keep silent about a frame-up she knows happened but can’t prove.
Lots of sex and booze, and perhaps half-a-dozen too many mentions of Lucky’s Hermès Birkin handbag, but this installment is as lively and endearingly wacky as Wanna Get Lucky? (2010).Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2544-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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