An enjoyable mix of suspense and glitz.
Blackmail, murder, and cybercrime fuel West’s (Sarah’s War, 2019, etc.) third mystery-series installment.
Emma Streat is preparing to leave snowy Boston for a romantic getaway to a Caribbean island with Lord Andrew Rodale when she receives an urgent phone call from her godmother, wealthy octogenarian Caroline Vogt. The older woman is being blackmailed, and she wants Emma to come to New York City immediately. Emma arrives at Caroline’s sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment that evening and learns that her godmother has already paid the blackmailer. Caroline is convinced that she knows who the culprit is: her first ex-husband, Pierre Hallam, who’s the only living person who knows a secret about her—that she gave a boy up for adoption long ago. She wants to hire a private security agency to hunt him down. The next night, someone breaks into Caroline’s apartment and tries to strangle her in her sleep, leaving her close to death. From her hospital bed, she extracts a promise from Emma that she will go to France, find Hallam, and confront him. Thus begins a twisty tale that treats readers to a tour of some of Europe’s more glamorous settings, complete with lushly detailed descriptions. Emma calls Andrew in England to reluctantly cancel their upcoming tropical tryst. Meanwhile, he’s been working with his French colleagues to bring down a nasty group of cybercriminals; Hallam, it seems, is already “a person of interest.” Soon, Emma’s life is in danger, as well. Although Emma is usually more of a connect-the-dots sleuth, West frequently places her in the midst of the action this time around. There are enough bad guys and red herrings that readers will suspect any new character that Emma encounters. Underlying the narrative is the complicated, poignant relationship between 48-year-old Emma and her elderly godmother. A second, seemingly divergent mystery plotline opens up when Emma accompanies Caroline to an art auction in Florence, Italy, but ultimately everything connects.
An enjoyable mix of suspense and glitz.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68463-010-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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