George’s fans will be glad to see Havers back in action, even though, as ever, she’s quick to land in trouble. And as for...
Inspector Lynley returns for a bout of trans-European hijinks—his first adventure outside Old Blighty.
Though an American herself, it’s taken George time to build a domestic audience for her long-running Lynley series, adapted for British television and then repatriated as an occasional Masterpiece Mystery offering. George’s hero is a nod to Dorothy Sayers, though Lynley, a discomfited lord working among the peasants of Scotland Yard, lacks most of Peter Wimsey’s affectations. For the first time in many volumes, George again pairs Lynley with tough-talking northerner Barbara Havers, who’s not always scrupulous about the letter of the law; as she tells one investigator, “I don’t care if you break laws or not....Spy on anyone you need to spy on. Go through their rubbish. Hack into their mobiles and their Internet accounts. Take over their email.” Rupert Murdoch would be proud, but Havers has a fraught mission: The daughter of a friend has been kidnapped in Italy, where her mother, estranged from that friend, has taken the child. Said friend, a Pakistani microbiologist, may not be entirely innocent—and in all events, it seems, shadowy parties want daughter and mother. Though the book is too long by a couple of hundred pages, George is a master of the wily plot and the timely tossed out red herring. She’s also not bad at the icky but effective detail: “Maggots still writhed in the man’s eyes, nose, and mouth; beetles had been feasting on his skin; mites and millipedes scurried into the open neck of his linen shirt.” Yet the book goes on long enough that some of the dramatic force is blunted; it could have benefited from some economizing. Too, George falls victim to the local-color gambit, insisting that ordinary terms be put into the other language: A cellphone is a cellphone is a cellphone, so calling it a telefonino to emphasize the fact that we’re in Italy is more than a touch precious.
George’s fans will be glad to see Havers back in action, even though, as ever, she’s quick to land in trouble. And as for Lynley—well, he’s as cool as ever, in more than one sense of the word.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95296-1
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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