The ritualistically extended final story, originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, marks Leonard’s shaggiest...
Two curtain-raisers and one extended tale bring back Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, the hero of The Hot Kid (2005) and Up in Honey’s Room (2007).
Even mythic figures were kids once, and the first of these stories, “Showdown at Checotah,” initiates Carlos Webster, the 15-year-old son of rancher Virgil Webster, by having him witness a robbery that turns lethal and yields revenge on the murderous robber. In “Louly and Pretty Boy,” Carl meets his future wife, Louly Brown, who won’t be available to marry him till she gets loose from minor-league gangster Joe Young and the much more consequential shadow of Pretty Boy Floyd. Despite Carl’s matter-of-fact personal maxim—“If I have to pull my weapon I will shoot to kill”—Louly’s deliverance comes from an unexpected quarter. Both these stories—deft, understated, violent and amusing—set the tone for “Comfort to the Enemy,” in which Carl, now a ripe 38, is called back to Oklahoma to investigate the hanging of Willi Martz, a German POW at Deep Fork. Since Leonard’s lawmen don’t exactly excel at investigating, it’s no surprise when Carl gets diverted into a search for perennial prison-camp escapee Jurgen Schrenk, who’s clearly keeping company with Shemane Morrissey, a former Tulsa society daughter who lost some of her debutante’s sheen when she was abducted for Teddy Ritz’s Kansas City whorehouse. Carl has no trouble finding Jurgen, of course, but complications arise in the form of Teddy’s two enforcers, the Tedesco brothers, who develop their own interest in Shemane and her German lover. As the cast members brush aside rumors of the death camps across the wide Atlantic, Carl, Jurgen, Shemane and Teddy constantly devise new ways to fraternize, efface the boundaries between good guys and bad guys and give aid and comfort to the enemy.
The ritualistically extended final story, originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, marks Leonard’s shaggiest hour to date. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-173515-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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