What works best are the matchless incidental pleasures Leonard’s world always provides, from lightning-fast descriptions to...
Leonard throws together three battle-hardened survivors from his earlier capers, with predictably unpredictable results.
Jack Foley (Out of Sight, 1996) robbed numerous banks before an amateurish mistake and a run-in with Bob Isom Gibbs, aka Maximum Bob, got him sent to prison for a 30-year stretch. There he meets Cundo Rey (LaBrava, 1983), the four-time killer from Cuba whose debt to society is much shorter. The two felons bond over the manifest injustice of Jack’s disproportionate sentence, and soon Cundo’s hooked Jack up with his smart-chick lawyer Megan Norris, who gets Jack’s sentence knocked down to 30 months less time served. As a result, he gets to go home before Cundo, and the home he goes to is one of the two houses psychic Dawn Navarro (Riding the Rap, 1995) keeps for Cundo. Despite his FBI nemesis Lou Adams’s certainty that Jack will rob another bank within a month, Jack and Cundo have their sights set higher than one more $5,000 score. They plan to insinuate Jack into Dawn’s business, beginning with her high-value deal to free movie star Danialle Karmanos from the oppressive ghost of her late movie-producer husband. Even before Jack’s met and charmed the susceptible Danny, he’s already insinuated himself between Dawn’s sheets, establishing himself as more than her business partner just in time to welcome Cundo back home. It’s clear from the get-go that the real action here won’t be the scam of Danny Karmanos but the drolly straight-faced efforts of the three co-conspirators to increase their share of the pot by reducing their numbers. Yet although the double-crosses are the stuff of the master’s best work, they come across as telegraphic and obligatory, as if the tale were a sketch for a more full-blooded novel.
What works best are the matchless incidental pleasures Leonard’s world always provides, from lightning-fast descriptions to bull’s-eye dialogue, as when Cundo complains about Dawn’s nagging: “Eight years inside I dream about her. I come out, she acts like she’s my wife.”Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-173314-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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