Kirkus Reviews QR Code
BODY OF LIES by Iris Johansen

BODY OF LIES

by Iris Johansen

Pub Date: March 26th, 2002
ISBN: 0-553-80097-3
Publisher: Bantam

A forensic sculptor still searches for her murdered daughter’s face in every skull she reconstructs.

Like any grieving mother, Eve Duncan hopes for closure—and she’s overcome when it turns out that a child’s skeleton found in the woods wasn’t Bonnie’s after all. Her true love Joe, an Atlanta police detective, meant well when he led her to believe otherwise; and Eve had found solace in tending the little grave and headstone until after its desecration by an unknown vandal—and after a laboratory DNA report, sent anonymously. Eve is compelled to leave Joe and her 12-year-old adopted daughter Jane to mull things over—and take an unusual assignment in Louisiana: Senator Kendal Melton wants some human remains reconstructed. Could they belong to his former rival for the Senate, Harold Bently, long missing and presumed dead? Eve is escorted to an old plantation house and left alone with cook Marie Letaux. Marie seems friendly enough—but could the Cajun food she prepares be . . . poisoned? Eve begins to feel sick as she enters the spooky old church in Baton Rouge where the senator wants her to work. Say, what’s in that huge coffin? Could it be the corpse of Etienne, unwary brother of the villainous Jules Herbert, who’s mixed up in all this somehow? Eve blacks out, and here’s where the plot sickens: various members of a mysterious group known as the Cabal may be planning to blow up a gigantic dam in China, drowning millions of innocents, all because—it seems—a renegade environmentalist may be intent on promoting his own fuel-cell development program. But why such slaughter? And is Harold Bently really dead or just pretending? Fortunately for Eve, her lost child’s ghost perches on the windowsill now and then to help answer these and other burning questions.

Elementary prose studded with innumerable clichés. But the convoluted storyline of this, Johansen’s sixtieth novel (Final Target, 2001, etc.), is sure to please faithful fans.