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IZMIR

A fourth globe-trotting turn for Jack Novak (Islamorada, p. 184, etc.), the ex-DEA operative who now does odd off-the-books jobs for agencies of the US government, damsels in distress, or anyone else who strikes his manic fancies. News that Jack's former partner, Manny Montijo, may have been kidnapped sends the Vietnam vet scurrying back to South Florida from Switzerland, where he was on the point of marrying longtime ladylove Melody (a lissome law-school student about half his age). Once on home ground, Jack learns his pal has been snatched by General Jorge Padilla, a Venezuelan drug lord who hopes to use Manny to trade out of the federal pen where he's doing hard time. At no small cost in blood, Jack (who finds time to bed Manny's Spanish cousin Pilar) manages to free his hermano from the Everglades fishing camp where he's been held captive by outlaw bikers. Rescue mission accomplished, the one-man wrecking crew rejoins Melody, who's now cruising the Aegean in a yacht owned by her gold-digging mum's current benefactor, an elderly and wealthy Turk named Mehmet Kurdlu. Shortly after boarding this well- appointed craft, Jack alertly saves all hands from death by pirates who, he deduces, came to kill Mehmet in revenge for a narcotics deal gone wrong. Following a brief stay at the grateful mogul's digs in scenic Izmir (during which Jack's drug suspicions are confirmed), the happy couple heads back to the Sunbelt, where Melody starts classes and her hard-drinking husband-to-be is obliged to retrieve Pilar from the vindictive Latinos who grabbed her by mistake. At the close, on his wedding day, Jack has yet to escape the long arm of the still-imprisoned Padilla or to ensure that Novak justice will be done by the absent Kurdlu, meaning that their paths almost surely will cross again. Crude, chaotic, and puerile, with appeal mainly for those looking to step up in class from action comics.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996

ISBN: 1-55611-474-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Donald Fine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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THE WINNER

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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