Hey, she’s gotta get back to Harvard, and Cira’s gold, the stuff dreams are made of, must surely reappear.
Johansen’s sixth entry about forensics sculptor Eve Duncan (Blind Alley, 2005, etc.), who shapes human faces from the skulls of murder victims.
This time, Duncan’s psychic 20-year-old foster daughter, sketch artist Jane MacGuire, takes a starring role. Jane, an archeology major at Harvard, has been on three digs to Herculaneum, where she learned that her face is identical to that of Cira, a Roman courtesan 2,000 years dead. Cira’s ravishing visage appears painted on a wall uncovered from the volcanic ash in Herculaneum, but seemingly buried with her was a chest of gold, now lost. Or not lost. Shortly after Jane’s close student friend, Mike Fitzpatrick, is murdered, back into her life comes risk-taking Mark Trevor, a Scot whose restrained lust for Jane has built up in the four years since they struck sparks in Italy. Trevor flies strong-willed Jane to Aberdeen to let her read ancient scrolls found in a buried tunnel at Herculaneum and to keep her from the clutches of the abominable seekers after Cira’s box of gold: Grozak, a murderer, smuggler, whoremaster and dabbler in drugs whose strings are pulled by gold-obsessed slimeball Reilly. This leaves Eve and her true love, Atlanta police detective Joe Quinn, to worry back in the States. Now more or less alone in the historic castle Trevor has leased, will Jane (at last over 18) and her sexy Scot find velvet nights and silver mornings? Only in passing. To find Cira’s gold, Reilly needs to kidnap Jane. So Trevor, his crew and Jane fly to Idaho to off Reilly, whose suicide bombers are on countdown to blow up a nuclear plant. Will Jane then find the gold?
Hey, she’s gotta get back to Harvard, and Cira’s gold, the stuff dreams are made of, must surely reappear.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80342-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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