A delightful period piece you won’t put down until the truth is revealed.
A flash of déjà vu involves an amateur sleuth in a bizarre case in a mystery set in 1920s England.
Now married to author Jack Haldean, whom she first met when she was a murder suspect (After the Exhibition, 2014), Betty Wingate invites her friend Jenny Langton for a girls’ night out, little suspecting that it will lead to one of Jack’s most unusual cases. The ambitious Jenny has secretly been feeding her estate-agent boss articles on the capabilities of modern women, so he gives her the chance to go and write up a property. The housekeeper of the 1882 dwelling is delighted to show her around, but Jenny has the strange feeling she’s seen it before and even knows the color schemes of the rooms before she sees them. Although she’s greatly upset by these feelings, she’s utterly unprepared for the moment when she touches a cedar tree in the garden, sees a monster, and faints. When she confides in Betty that evening that she fears she’s losing her mind, Betty urges her to talk to Jack, whose very practical suggestion that Jenny had either visited or lived in the house as a child is supported by further investigation. When Caroline Trevelyan vanished from the house in 1907, her husband, Michael, was suspected of murdering her even though her body was never found. Jenny asks her brother, Martin, about this history, and he grudgingly admits that Jenny had indeed lived there as the daughter of Caroline and Michael; his parents later brought her up as one of their own because his mother was Caroline’s sister. DCI Bill Rackham, the friend Jack brings on the case to get access to police records, is glad to help because he’s taken a shine to Jenny. But then someone who knew the Trevelyans in the past is murdered, and Jenny’s father becomes the main suspect despite her aunt’s protestations that he’s as innocent now as he was back then.
A delightful period piece you won’t put down until the truth is revealed.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8846-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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