Her forays into medical issues lead McKevett to crowd the best pieces of her puzzle into the last chapters, but she still...
A medical examiner fears she may be shielding a murderer when she conceals her best friend’s suicide.
Jennifer Liu risks her medical license when she reports her best friend’s death as an accident rather than suicide. But she’d promised Brianne Marston that she’d protect her secret if Brianne took her own life rather than face the slow and painful deterioration of Halstead’s disease. Now Jennifer’s having second thoughts. Another young victim appears in the morgue with the same cocktail of deadly drugs found in Brianne’s body. Did Nels Farrow, afflicted with the same genetic disease as Brianne, conspire with her in a suicide pact? Did they independently discover the same recipe for ending their lives prematurely? Or were they killed by a third party to save them from suffering or for some darker reason? Before she turns herself in to the authorities, Jennifer has to know the truth. So she asks another close friend, private detective Savannah Reid (Hide and Sneak, 2018, etc.), to examine the connection between Brianne and Nels. Savannah doesn’t mind; her husband Dirk Coulter’s refusal to let her in on his latest case for the San Carmelita Police Department has left her with time on her hands. But discovering the real Brianne Marston proves a challenge. No sooner has her boyfriend, Paul Oxley, described Brianne in her last days as paranoid and delusional than Brianne’s goat-keeper, Dee, reports that Brianne was highly centered and focused but abused and exploited by her good-for-nothing boyfriend. Struggling to untangle the riddle that was Brianne helps Savannah appreciate the complexities of living with a fatal illness, bring a killer to justice, and release Jennifer from the pain of self-doubt.
Her forays into medical issues lead McKevett to crowd the best pieces of her puzzle into the last chapters, but she still offers enough detection to satisfy fans of the Moonlight Magnolia franchise.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2010-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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