A mystery thriller about an enticing diva that lacks fully developed characters and a dynamic plot.
While on a visit to New York City, a detective attracted to an opera singer finds himself targeted by a jealous rival.
In the 14th installment of his 1920s Detective Cyrus Skeen series, Cline (Wintery Discontent, 2015, etc.) follows the intrepid Cyrus from San Francisco to New York, where he must pay a visit to his parents’ lawyer while his secretary-turned-wife, Dilys Jones, remains in California. In New York, Cyrus meets opera diva Brianna O’Quill, who lives in his parents’ apartment building and who immediately takes a shine to Cyrus. Cyrus, who is determined to remain faithful to the wife he loves, feels an attraction to Brianna, who senses this and decides to continue pursuing him as she prepares for her starring role in Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera House. At one point, Cyrus admits to himself that he finds her “very tempting” (“She had ignited a spark of desire in him that he hadn’t felt since encountering Dilys. He enjoyed her manner and style and almost everything else about her”). Unfortunately, Cyrus is not the only man in Brianna’s life, and he soon realizes that he’s the target of an envious rival. Is it mysterious composer Leopold Schacht, domineering director Morton Lawry, or smitten bass-baritone Charles Durance who has it in for Cyrus? And will the opera production proceed smoothly as Cyrus tries to stop a possible killer? Cline certainly lays the groundwork for an entertaining 1920s mystery here. He possesses a keen eye for period details, including the intricacies of the opera business, that helps make the story entertaining. Unfortunately, the characters feel like flat, unremarkable archetypes. The flamboyant Brianna says such melodramatic lines, like “I won’t mind the agony, Cyrus. It’s all I know” and “You, however, sweetheart, can look up my skirt any time,” that she seems like a strange blend of Greta Garbo and Mae West. Cyrus, meanwhile, is supposed to be a hard-boiled Bogart-esque gumshoe, but he spends so much time reading about opera that he doesn’t get a chance to show off any mystery-solving skills. The novel’s length—109 pages—means that there isn’t much in the way of either character development or suspenseful plotting. In the end, more space is devoted to providing lengthy summaries of the opera than to crafting a satisfying mystery for readers.
A mystery thriller about an enticing diva that lacks fully developed characters and a dynamic plot.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5233-8181-4
Page Count: 114
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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