AN OLD, COLD GRAVE

Name: AN OLD, COLD GRAVE
Author: Iona Whishaw
ISBN: 978-1-77151-240-4

by Iona Whishaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2017

A fascinating picture of a life in which many people spent every waking hour working and a disturbing look at the fate of...

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Anyone who yearns for the good old days should think twice before approaching this gritty tale.

Lane Winslow grew up in an affluent English household and served as a spy during World War II. A failed romance and lack of family ties have encouraged her move to rural King’s Cove, British Columbia, in search of tranquility. Beautiful and self-sufficient, she has already been involved with two murder cases (Death in a Darkening Mist, 2017, etc.) and forged a working relationship with Inspector Darling that each secretly hopes may lead to more. When sisters Gwen and Mabel Hughes and their mother, Gladys, discover human remains after the ceiling of their root cellar partly collapses, their first thought is to call Lane because of her in with the police. Although there’s obviously no need to rush in a death whose date and cause are unknown, Darling and Constable Ames are determined to at least identify the bones, which appear to be those of a child or small woman who died sometime during the 37 years after the root cellar was built around 1910. Darling asks Lane to help out by trying to identify who went missing all those years ago. Most of the community supports her efforts, but there are plenty of secrets buried in the past. At length the search focuses on the Anscomb family, who vanished from the area after an unsuccessful attempt to grow apples, since they had several young children fitting the description. Flashbacks to 1910 reveal a hard life with no modern conveniences and the relentless work schedule required to keep families alive. Even though her friends continue to hide things, Lane manages to learn a great deal—maybe too much, as she realizes when a ghost returns from the past and threatens her safety.

A fascinating picture of a life in which many people spent every waking hour working and a disturbing look at the fate of orphaned children raise this mystery above the ordinary.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-77151-240-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: TouchWood Editions

Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | HISTORICAL MYSTERY

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A DECEPTIVE DEVOTION
by Iona Whishaw

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A SORROWFUL SANCTUARY
by Iona Whishaw

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IT BEGINS IN BETRAYAL
by Iona Whishaw

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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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)