A promising series debut with pleasing characters, plenty of suspects, and helpful tips on home staging.
Nothing derails a good start in a new career like murder.
Laura Bishop, who’s given up her boring IT job, hopes to begin afresh as a house stager, assisted by Tyrone Webster, a talented young man trying to get a scholarship to help with his design studies. Their first job is staging an immense historic home reluctantly offered for sale by abrasive Victoria Denton. Victoria wasn’t raised wealthy, and although her failed marriage to Skip Denton got her the position in life she yearned for, she can’t afford to keep the house, which has beautiful bones but is dark, dreary, dirty, and overfilled with furniture. Doug Hamilton, retired from the Navy and recently come home to help his dad at Hamilton Real Estate, has given Laura a week to whip the place into shape before the first open house, an almost impossible task. Though Victoria could hardly have been more unpleasant to work with, Laura is horrified when her client's dead body falls out of a laundry chute at her feet. When Detective Spangler arrests Tyrone because he has no alibi and had a fight with Victoria over a vase he broke, Laura accedes to the appeal of Tyrone’s grandmother for help. She knows no more about detecting than Doug Hamilton does about real estate—everything she’s learned comes from books and TV shows—but as she toils to finish the staging, she finds time to ask questions of so many people who disliked Victoria that she gets threatening calls, is almost run off the road, and has her tires slashed. Scared and angry, she soldiers on, determined to free Tyrone.
A promising series debut with pleasing characters, plenty of suspects, and helpful tips on home staging.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63511-490-4
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Henery Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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