The perfect in-flight read. The only thing that’s dated is the long-distance train.
A year after reprinting Hughes’ first novel, The So Blue Marble (1940), Otto Penzler follows it with her eighth, a 1945 tale of murder feared and then executed aboard a long-distance train.
Vivien Spender is a powerful enough producer/director to do whatever he wants, and what he’s wanted for years is to find the perfect actress to play the enigmatic Clavdia Chauchat in his film adaptation of The Magic Mountain. Viv’s fancies have alighted on one candidate after another even as his devotion to Thomas Mann’s novel has remained constant. Kitten Agnew, a bona fide movie star, has convinced herself that she’s vanquished the opposition and landed the part, but Viv’s spotted a new Clavdia: Newfoundland librarian Gratia Shawn, whom he discovered while she was visiting Hollywood: “She couldn’t act but he’d teach her that.” He’s offered Kitten $1 million to buy out her contract, but she refuses to sell because she thinks the damning evidence she’s collected that Viv murdered his first wife puts her in the driver’s seat. Now, as Kitten and Gratia share a compartment aboard the Super Chief speeding from Los Angeles to New York and carrying Viv and Mike Dana, the female assistant who’s long been sweet on him, Kitten is terrified that once Viv realizes how legally indefensible his position is, he’ll have no choice but to kill her as well. As the shadows lengthen and the sense of claustrophobia thickens, Hughes examines this combustible mixture from the viewpoints of violinist-turned-bandleader Les Augustin, failed screenwriter Sidney Pringle, alcoholic reporter Hank Cavanaugh, Pullman porter James Cobbett, and the principals, each of whom scrutinizes the others as both predators and potential prey. Murder will indeed strike, but it will do little to alter the pervasive sense of dread and doom.
The perfect in-flight read. The only thing that’s dated is the long-distance train.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61316-145-6
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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