As usual, Buster (Interlock, 2012, etc.) provides a playful workout for your sense of humor, unless, of course, you’re a...
Stand-up comic Buster Hightower, his beloved Carla and a gaggle of slapstick-driven neurotics chase after MacGuffins.
When Judith Roswell needs cash to placate the bill collectors, she brings a snazzy “family heirloom” to pawnbroker Randall Coll. Disappointed with the meager sum he offers, she snatches it back, returns home, packs up the treasures secreted in her basement and donates them to the charity Services for the Needy. The pawnbroker, however, has his wacky nephew Mad Dog follow her, a task he botches so badly that she hires a private eye to find out who’s stalking her. The shamus, black sheep Tyler Polk "Tip" Taylor III, estranged from his philandering dad and alcoholic mumsy, has recently received a diploma from the Gumshoe Online Institute of Private Detection. Judith hires Tip over the phone while she’s arranging for Carla and her Last Chance Agency to provide car insurance for his Aston Martin. The trio realize that Judith is fudging facts about her family treasures, which have now attracted the attention of reality TV developer Vance Popkirk and decrepit former Roswell housemaid Harriet, who thinks she’s entitled to some of the loot as payment for Judith’s father’s pawing her. Soon, Randall is spying on Mad Dog, who’s busy trying to strangle Harriet, shoot Judith’s brother and dragoon Popkirk into a partnership. Meanwhile, Tip tries to get into Judith’s pants, Harriet lunges for Tip’s zipper, and mumsy hires a lawyer to clean out the elder Tip in divorce proceedings. Carla, a matchmaker to the core of her middle-aged bones, tries to get the Taylors together again while Buster ends his nightly gig at the Westside Bowling Alley and Casino with stale but funny lawyer jokes. A little nookie and a lot of car chases and clandestine house entries complete the plot, which draws its inspiration from the 1954 robbery of the Pioneer Safe Deposit Vaults.
As usual, Buster (Interlock, 2012, etc.) provides a playful workout for your sense of humor, unless, of course, you’re a lawyer.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2717-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Five Star
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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