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PRETTY GUILTY WOMEN

An easy, breezy beach read with a clever twist.

Four women confess to the murder of one man during a wild wedding weekend at a swanky California resort.

The DeBleu-Banks weekend wedding extravaganza is underway at the Serenity Spa & Resort, and three college friends of the bride are about to be reunited after nearly two decades. Gorgeous and successful lawyer Kate Cross has everything she’s ever wanted, except for a baby, and her boyfriend, Max, fed up with the stress of trying to conceive, dumps her at the resort’s front desk. Ginger Adler is a harried and married mom of three who is tired of being the “responsible one” compared to her beloved but free-spirited husband, Frank, and hopes for some peace and quiet, which is not to be. Her 15-year-old daughter, Elsie, is up to something, and Ginger must face her ex–best friend, Emily Brown, whom she caught drunkenly making out with Frank in college. Little does Ginger know, the loss of a child years ago has Emily drowning her sorrows in alcohol and a fling with handsome Henry, whom she met, and had sex with, on the plane. Then there’s elegant 68-year-old Lulu Franc, the groom's aunt, whose fifth husband, Pierce, is acting squirrelly. The wild card is young mother Sydney Banks. Kate becomes fond of the young woman and her baby, Lydia, but something’s off about Sydney. The weekend is filled with bonding, lots of champagne, and no shortage of melodrama, but no one expects murder. When a man is found dead, Lulu, Kate, Ginger, and Emily each confess to the crime—as revealed in police interview transcripts with the suspects, the bride, and gossipy staff members—but their stories don’t add up. Lamanna’s characters aren’t too deeply drawn, but they’re familiar enough to connect with, and more than a few burning questions keep the pages turning: What is Lulu’s husband up to? What is Sydney’s real story? And, of course, who is the dead guy, and what really happened to him?

An easy, breezy beach read with a clever twist.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4926-9406-9

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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