An addictive romance/adventure with well-developed protagonists.
This fourth installment of a New Orleans Mystery series sends an actor and amateur sleuth to Europe to rescue his fiancee.
The hidden forces orchestrating the chaos of the last three volumes in this series starring Jeff Chaussier have now threatened close relatives of his fiancee, Bryna: her brother, Brian, recently released from prison; his wife, Sarah; and their baby. It was decided that “the family had to disappear for a while” and that “Bryna should go with them as a stabilizing force for the baby.” But the months are slipping by and Bryna has not returned. Jeff begins to receive occasional disturbing letters from her suggesting that she is not free to leave. Among her “protectors” is the handsome and aggressive Gianni di Piantagione, who seems intent on either seducing or raping her. Sanchez (A Place Unchanged, 2015, etc.) has changed the format and tenor that fans have come to expect in this continuing saga. Jeff now shares first-person narrating responsibilities with Bryna, whose story is delivered through increasingly long, somber letters, some of which are never mailed. And the narrative takes on a more self-reflective tone. It becomes clear there is only one thing for Jeff to do. The world’s most phobic flyer will have to go to Italy, his trip funded by the man he thinks of as “Mi Padrino,” the enigmatic, gray-haired figure who may have sent Bryna and her family into hiding. In Sorrento, Jeff meets up with his brother, Jaime, who provides critical support fighting the bad guys. Jeff’s search for Bryna frequently sounds like a travelogue of Florence, Bologna, and Venice, sometimes overshadowing and slowing down the pace of the drama, although the author still delivers exciting action scenes. Meanwhile, chapters written in Bryna’s voice deftly reveal the gradual deterioration of her mental stability, turning the tale into a psychological thriller. Sanchez sprinkles in clues to the original mystery running through the saga, but as with any engaging soap opera, the puzzle isn’t quite complete. Because the appealing couple are not out of danger yet, another series installment appears likely.
An addictive romance/adventure with well-developed protagonists.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5169-1069-4
Page Count: 261
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
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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