More an offbeat love story than a rip-roaring adventure but fun, with another sequel promised.
In the seventh volume of Sanchez’s Jeff Chaussier New Orleans Mystery series, the saga of Jeff and Bryna continues for another round of chaos and life-threatening adventure.
In this ever more complex soap opera, Jeff, devoted son of New Orleans, is now living in New York with his beautiful de facto wife, Rita Edwards. Yes, he is still married to his soul mate, Bryna Boudreaux, but life is complicated. Everyone has decided it’s best for his children (two with Bryna and one with Rita) to be raised up North because Bryna’s mental stability is still compromised. Jeff has given up acting and has turned to writing. Rita is a working actress, and Jeff is content as a stay-at-home dad. As the story opens, it appears that Jeff and Rita are vacationing at a beach resort. Then Bryna phones. She has been receiving enigmatic threats, and she needs Jeff’s help—the kind of help and commitment her current “roommate,” Harry/Harriet cannot offer. Seasoned followers of the series are likely to be shaking their heads at this turn of events. New readers are advised to read earlier volumes to get a better sense of the eccentric cast. Sanchez fills in some background, but this episode is best for those who have been waiting to find out what happens next. Jeff has issues with Harriet beyond the fact that she has been sleeping with Bryna. He suspects that this mysterious owner of an art gallery has ulterior motives, like everyone who has used Bryna in the past. This is just one of the quirky relationships in Sanchez’s latest episode. And despite a few well-choreographed action scenes, unconventional relationships are at the heart of this sexy installment. Bryna and Rita form a sisterly bond even as each of them is in love with Jeff. For his part, our perpetually conflicted lead character, who is the articulate, pleasantly sardonic narrator of the tale, loves Rita but will always be in love with Bryna.
More an offbeat love story than a rip-roaring adventure but fun, with another sequel promised.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-67-415434-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Southern Girl Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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