Another dogged forensic psychologist tracks another serial killer, and vice versa. The details of Charlotte, North Carolina, psychic healer Tamara Meredith’s murder would be grisly enough on their own—the New Age Baptist cable celebrity was stabbed perhaps a hundred times by a madman who cut off her hands as a souvenir—but they become even more disturbing in the context of rising-star newspaper columnist John Campion’s suggestion that they’re only part of a pattern going back at least to Campion’s time in Orlando, when he covered a murder he’s convinced was the work of the same sicko. Unfortunately, Campion, who’s nothing if not career-minded, doesn’t make his suggestion to anyone but Kate Loveless, his managing editor at the Charlotte Star. Together the two bedmates-to-be hatch a plot to keep Campion’s news flash secret while he goes undercover as a psychiatric patient in an attempt to gather information that will embarrass the authorities’ pitiful attempts at psychological profiling. Campion’s target is Dr. Portia McTeague, the forensic psychologist who’s had plenty of adulatory press since her debut (Over the Line, 1998), but who’s clearly riding for a fall this time. By day, Campion insinuates himself into Portia’s practice, spinning tales about his troubled past; after hours, Portia, a Help Line volunteer, begins to get calls from a someone named Ivan who knows an awful lot about the Charlotte murders (of which there are soon more). Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it doesn’t to Portia, who takes a while to realize that Ivan, who alternates between begging for help and insisting that he’s beyond it, is not just your average caller. Readers starved for novelty, like Portia’s protective, exasperated suitor Alan Simpson, will follow Ivan’s movements more alertly, and perhaps more impatiently. A particular shame in this synthetic sequel is that what looks like the most original variation on the serial-killer formula—the duplicitous reporter bent on discrediting the heroine—turns out to be just more of the same old same old.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48526-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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