Buffa writes with authority but not economy, with little sense of character or suspense. He tells us how special and...
Criminal defense attorney Joseph Antonelli returns (The Legacy, 2002, etc.), in a fifth legal thriller as pretentious and plodding as its predecessors.
The murder of incandescent cinema beauty Mary Margaret Flanders saddens Hollywood, and the subsequent arrest of her husband, high-powered filmmaker Stanley Roth, turns the sadness to shock and scandal. Acclaimed defender Antonelli (who narrates) takes the case because of his admittedly romantic fascination with the deceased. The charismatic Roth, a generation older than his wife, transformed her from housewife and mother Marian Walsh into the three-named superstar—echoing Citizen Kane, a film that’s obsesses Roth. He’s written Blue Zephyr (the name of his studio), a screenplay that echoes both the Welles classic and his own life, thereby making certain Hollywood colleagues nervous. Antonelli interviews some of these—aging leading men Louis Griffin and Walker Bradley, and studio financial genius Michael Wirthlin—as well as Marian’s gentle first husband, Paul Ehrlich, without getting any closer to the mystery. Mary was found floating facedown, naked, with her throat cut, in the pool of the Roth estate. The only evidence again Roth is his bloody clothing, found in a laundry hamper. At the trial (it dominates the book’s last half), tenacious but otherwise unexceptional prosecuting attorney Annabelle Van Roten tries to paint both Roth and Antonelli as media whores. Her key witness is the Mark Fuhrman–like LAPD detective Richard Crenshaw, who found the bloody clothes and had once answered a domestic disturbance call at the Roth home—and, naturally, has a hot screenplay in his pocket. Antonelli gets closer to Roth than he ever intended or desired, becoming the confidante of the increasingly isolated mogul and almost having an affair with Roth’s amanuensis, Julie Evans. Roth even entrusts him with a copy of Blue Zephyr, unread by anyone else.
Buffa writes with authority but not economy, with little sense of character or suspense. He tells us how special and brilliant his characters are but doesn’t convey it in his prose.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15034-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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