Though this sort-of prequel to Ramsay’s Ike Schwartz series (The Vulture, 2015, etc.) isn’t much of a mystery, it’s...
A decorated World War I veteran returns to Buffalo Mountain, Virginia, dissatisfied with the life he finds there after he’s seen Gay Paree and a whole lot more.
Jesse Sutherlin and his extended McAdoo family have spent generations scraping a living out of poor farming country, making moonshine and continuing their ongoing feud with the equally poor Lebrun clan, who live on the other side of the mountain. When a shellshocked veteran is killed while tending Big Tom McAdoo’s illegal still, Jesse’s hotheaded relatives overrule his reasonable objections and jump to the conclusion that the killer must have been a Lebrun. Big Tom gives Jesse, who’s seen too many men die in the killing fields of Europe, four days to find out the truth before a battle breaks out. Jesse, a brevet second lieutenant awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, has found himself a good job as foreman of the nearby lumber mill and quickly sees an opportunity to make some money by acquiring a well-timbered parcel of land whose ownership is in limbo. He’s also renewed his old friendship with mill secretary Serena Barker, who’s distantly related to the Lebruns. Jesse and his brother Abel arrive just in time to stop his cousin Anse and his drunken friends from lynching Serena’s brother. When Jesse is arrested for the murder of the one Lebrun who’s agreed to work with him to solve the original murder, a local lawyer fights to get him released and help him acquire the property he wants. Before Jesse can get on with his job and his pursuit of Serena, though, he still has to catch a killer.
Though this sort-of prequel to Ramsay’s Ike Schwartz series (The Vulture, 2015, etc.) isn’t much of a mystery, it’s memorable for its powerful portrayal of the difficult lives of proud but poorly educated people too set in their ways to change.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0782-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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