Although the Scottish hero and his apothecary sidekick in Dillon’s series debut are a mite anachronistic in their pursuit of...
A deputy sheriff balances patriotic loyalty against sworn duty in late-13th-century Scotland.
After he lost his wife and child in a fire, Kyle Shaw hired out his battle-ax to King Philip of France. When he returns to his home in Ayrshire, Scotland, he agrees to resume his former post of deputy to the ailing sheriff Reginald de Crawford, even though the office has diminished over the years. The Scottish king is the prisoner of Edward Longshanks, King of England, whose soldiers have occupied Scotland and assumed increasing power, especially Sir Henry de Percy, the Castellan of Ayr. Although Kyle is able to fend off a band of English raiders stealing sheep from a small holding, he’s hard-pressed to demand justice for the victim, who claims that what the English, or Southrons, can’t confiscate legally, they simply seize. When Megan Brodie, a girl of 16, is raped and murdered, Kyle asks an apothecary friend to examine the girl’s body and learns she was pregnant. Megan’s father insists that Lucky Jack Sweeney, captain of horse at Ayr Garrison, is the murderer, and Kyle suspects the Englishman is also the father of Megan’s child. But the deputy must proceed cautiously and prevent the aggrieved father from avenging his daughter’s defiling and death. Good Scotsman though he is, Kyle is bound to keep civil order and follow English law, much as he doubts that Sir Henry will take action against his own countryman. Kyle is also charged with protecting a royal envoy to Philip at the same time painful rumors about his father’s death five years ago add to his grief, which a hint of romance to come could ease.
Although the Scottish hero and his apothecary sidekick in Dillon’s series debut are a mite anachronistic in their pursuit of forensic science, Kyle is an attractive hero trying to do right by both Southrons and Scots.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2878-3
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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