Byron embeds her tricky mystery in an amusing and informative tale of Cajun life and the logistical travails of Mardi Gras.
Wish you were in Louisiana for Mardi Gras? Wish again.
Major flooding has dumped piles of trash and an unidentified body in St. Pierre Parish. Maggie Crozat’s boyfriend, Bo Durand, is a detective for the Pelican Police Department, but although Maggie’s nose for murder (Body on the Bayou, 2016, etc.) makes her curious about the anonymous corpse, she’s so busy that she pushes it to the back of her mind until Bo tells her the death was no accident. Replacing her Gran, who feels poorly, Maggie is roped into judging the Miss Pelican Mardi Gras Gumbo Queen Pageant, a chore that quickly entangles her in another murder. The other judges are Constance Damboise and her husband, Gerard, the stuffy, snobbish president of the historical society; convenience store owner Robbie Metz; and star beauty products sales rep Maureen “Mo” Heedles, a vivacious woman with an outsize personality. Constance and Gerard are already squabbling over an exhibit featuring the orphan trains that carried children from the North in search of a better life in Louisiana. While the pageant mothers do their best to influence the judges, Gerard is certain that Belle Tremblay will win because she’s an attractive girl from one of the area’s finest families. Maggie is literally nudged into the case when Gerard runs into the back of her car and mutters, “Lies. Secrets,” before he keels over dead. Then she’s asked to restore a picture at the plantation where she works part time, and beneath the peeling painting she finds another one that references a possible treasure site. On top of everything else, Maggie must prepare for Mardi Gras, deal with her father’s obsession with the perfect gumbo, and figure out why Bo’s been so distant lately.
Byron embeds her tricky mystery in an amusing and informative tale of Cajun life and the logistical travails of Mardi Gras.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-705-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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