A vet with investigative chops and his loyal coonhound make an appealing duo in this origin story.
In this debut thriller, a fire destroys the research wing of a rural upstate New York cosmetic corporation’s headquarters, casting suspicion on the animal rights activists who recently protested at the company.
Kent Stephenson’s older brother, Merrill, Jefferson’s chief of police, enforces the law, and their misfit half brother, Maylon (nicknamed May-May), has been known to break it. Kent, a small-town veterinarian always in the company of his coonhound, Lucinda, focuses on doing the right thing, especially when it comes to animals. Kent once had romantic feelings toward Stef Copithorn, CEO of the cosmetic company that’s crucial to the local economy. Aubrey Fairbanks, field representative for the Hollywood-based Freedom of Animals Movement, is in town organizing a protest against animal testing conducted by Stef’s company. Kent’s attraction to gorgeous Aubrey is a professional, not personal, concern to the now openly gay Stef. The two women disagree vehemently about the humaneness of animal welfare codes. When a blaze obliterates the cosmetic company’s research wing, suspicion falls on FOAM, and Kent feels duped—at least for a time—by Aubrey, with whom he’s begun a relationship. During Kent’s visit with his wheelchair-bound mother, June Stephenson Mays, the two discuss the fire and also the supposed suicide of a well-known local journalist. June does not believe the man—her dear friend—killed himself; she says it had to be murder, and Kent vows to find out if she’s right. He also questions her about his jailbird half brother’s recent activities and ponders their legitimacy. Kent finds more to investigate when a family member is apparently murdered. In addition, dogs in the town, disappearing occasionally at first, start to vanish in record numbers. Can Lucinda remain unscathed? Martorana produces a compelling story starring an engaging hero. The author also introduces notable characters like June, with her “matchstick legs,” “kittenish white hair,” and no-nonsense attitude. At one point, she tells Kent that May-May’s “got his father’s wickedness.” Descriptions are strong, such as the account of how police cars are clustered at a crime scene: “The lot was jammed with official vehicles parked at all angles, the way cops like to do.” Both sides of the animal rights controversy are well-presented. But the depictions of abused animals could be upsetting to some readers.
A vet with investigative chops and his loyal coonhound make an appealing duo in this origin story.Pub Date: March 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9989326-0-6
Page Count: 282
Publisher: VinChaRo Ventures LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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