The first in a new series for St. James (Oak and Dagger, 2013, etc.) features an appealingly reflective heroine and a varied...
A woman who’s never been properly loved has a chance for a new start in life.
Charity Penn is the illegitimate daughter of the much-married scion of a wealthy family. She’s never lacked for subsistence funding, but except for one half sister and Granny Mae, her relatives usually ignore her. When Penn gets a card telling her she’s won a trip to Camellia Beach, South Carolina, along with free cooking lessons at the local chocolate shop, she’s wary—who wins a prize for a contest she hasn't entered?—and asks her prep school friend Skinny, who’s traveling to a surfing competition nearby, to check it out. Soon Penn gets a voicemail from Skinny telling her he’s found exciting information and inviting her to come down. Before she can decide what to do, she learns that Skinny’s been found dead in a vat of chocolate. Packing up her feisty papillon, Stella, Penn heads south. The police insist Skinny was killed in a drug deal gone wrong, but Penn knows Skinny didn’t do drugs. Arriving in Camellia Beach, she meets Althea, the daughter of Bertie Bays, companion and helper to Miss Mabel, the chocolate shop owner who wants to teach her to make chocolate. Penn is quickly swept up in the tug of war between those who want to keep the natural beauty of the sleepy town and those who want to make a buck modernizing it. Even families are divided, as Penn learns when she meets two attorneys, Calhoun Dalton, a member of the tear-down group, and his brother, Harley, a defender of the status quo who had a nasty verbal encounter with Skinny the night he died. When Miss Mabel dies suddenly, Penn is shocked to learn she's inherited the chocolate shop—and so are Miss Mabel’s relatives. Since South Carolina law will pass the inheritance to the family if Penn dies before five days are up, she has the world’s best motive to solve the case.
The first in a new series for St. James (Oak and Dagger, 2013, etc.) features an appealingly reflective heroine and a varied roster of suspects.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68331-291-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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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