Florio’s flawed, complex, compelling heroine faces challenges that are both gut-wrenchingly difficult and all too common...
Can a Montana reporter sunk deep into despair after the death of her husband ever climb out of the pit she’s dug for herself?
Not even the evident distress of her 8-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her beloved dog, Bub, have cut the vicious cycle of pills that gives Lola Wicks relief from the pain of losing her husband, Charlie, in an eco-terrorist bombing six months earlier (Reservations, 2017). Margaret has just enough Native American blood to be considered part of the Blackfoot tribe, and after Charlie's death, the "aunties" of the tribe "swept in...cooking and cleaning and taking care of Margaret, and Lola, too." But now Jan, Lola's best friend and colleague on the local paper in Magpie, is driving her to an intervention: she and the aunties have realized they’re only enabling Lola in behavior so destructive that a social worker has considered removing Margaret from her home. Jan has arranged for Lola to go to Salt Lake City to write a human interest story for a religious magazine about Mormon adoptions; the editor of the magazine, Donovan Munro, has arranged for her to interview the Shumway family, who had adopted a 10-year-old Vietnamese boy some years earlier to add to their household of five daughters. Even before Lola arrives at her appointment with the Shumways, though, their neighbor Sariah Ballard is murdered and Trang, also called Frank, is arrested. The Ballards and Shumways are best friends, and Frank was engaged to Sariah Ballard's daughter Tynslee, though they're both still in high school. Struggling to function without her pills, Lola scores a new supply from a nervous boy she later finds is her editor Donovan Munro’s son, Malachi. Since all the teens know each other, Lola is convinced they’ll be her best source if only she can get them to open up about their secrets. It takes a trip all the way to Vietnam for Lola to uncover some of these secrets, and even then she gets the answer wrong. But her hunt for the truth starts her on the road to recovery.
Florio’s flawed, complex, compelling heroine faces challenges that are both gut-wrenchingly difficult and all too common today. Her determination to rise above them raises this convoluted tale far above the crowd.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5053-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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