Second-novelist Johansen (The Ugly Duckling, p. 249) clearly has a penchant for superwoman protagonists who emerge victorious in the face of all adversity. Kate Denby, a scientist, is pushing 30, and her marriage—to an old-fashioned (i.e., chauvinist) cop—is over, but she's got three things that make life worth living: her work, her son, and her mother-in-law, who lives with her and cares for nine-year-old Joshua when Kate's at the lab. In fact, Kate's all-consuming work at Genetech in Oklahoma was a large factor in her ex-husband's disillusionment with their relationship. But Kate doesn't really care: She's getting closer and closer to a medical breakthrough she's researching at Genetech on her own time. Then, when Kate starts getting aggressively courted by famous geneticist Noah Smith—who wants her to help him with the final states of RU2, the ``miracle drug'' he's close to completing—trouble breaks out. Noah's lab explodes (it's thought that he died in the blast). Then it appears that whoever ``got'' Noah is after Kate. Following a series of minor mishaps, her ex-husband's car explodes when Joshua was supposed to be in it, and that's the last straw. Noah, who isn't dead after all, convinces Kate to head for the hills— literally; once in hiding in West Virginia with Noah, Joshua, mother-in-law Phyllis, and Seth, Noah's darkly mysterious best friend/bodyguard, Kate and Noah are finally free to complete their research and plan for the release of RU2—which will, they think, eliminate all fatal illnesses in one big swoop. Unfortunately, however, Ishmaru, a hired assassin, is still on Kate's trail. There's a lot going on here, what with the futuristic medical breakthroughs, the determined assassin, the emergence of several late plot twists, and the romantic tension between Kate and all available males, but somehow it all works. Overall, then, a lively, engrossing ride by a strong new voice in the romantic suspense genre.
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-09715-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
Like her cast, James gets in a little more drama for a lively continuation of her series.
An impossible actor’s career ends when he dies midperformance, leaving a cast and crew who would have been all too willing to have done the deed.
Charlie Harris and his feline sidekicks, Maine coon Diesel and kitten Ramses, are all excited that Charlie’s daughter, Laura, and her husband, Frank, will be headlining Athena College’s spring production as lead actress and director in a homegrown new play, Careless Whispers. Laura was excited too until the male lead, who had to bail suddenly, is replaced by someone she knows all too well: Luke Lombardi. Laura’s had run-ins with Luke in the past and knows that he’s a drama queen in all the wrong ways. When Luke shows up in Mississippi, Charlie and his partner, Helen Louise Brady, are suitably unimpressed with his imperious attitude and clueless mini-entourage, but both figure there’s little to worry about until a string of pranks seems to escalate to Luke’s onstage murder. Though Charlie is concerned that Laura’s dislike of Luke might point to her as a suspect, c’mon! Chief Deputy Kanesha Berry, whom Charlie’s earlier investigations (The Pawful Truth, 2019, etc.) have made something of a family friend, doesn’t think Laura is guilty either, though she does have to follow procedure and question anyone with means and motive. While there aren’t many folks in the means category, Luke’s volatile and narcissistic manner has heaped the motive category with suspects—and can anyone blame them? It may all come down to unraveling the mystery behind the identity of the playwright, Finnegan Zwake, a pseudonym no one had thought to question until Charlie decides he can’t help but, once again, get involved.
Like her cast, James gets in a little more drama for a lively continuation of her series.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49115-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Save a friendship, save a life—a surprising lesson for an unusual and absorbing thriller.
A woman reunited with an estranged friend discovers that nothing about her has changed in 12 years—including the ages of her children—and can’t rest until she solves the mystery.
Beth Leeson has always wondered what happened to Flora Braid after their friendship fell apart. But the Braids moved away, and they lost touch. Twelve years later, Beth decides to check on her and spies Flora coaxing her two small children, Thomas and Emily, ages 5 and 3, out of their car—which is crazy, because that’s how old the kids were when Beth knew them. By now they should be teenagers. And the Braids’ youngest child, Georgina, isn't there at all. Beth isn’t crazy. She knows what she saw. Her daughter, Zannah, serves as a precocious sounding board for her evolving, and sometimes outlandish, theories: “Even if a science genius invented a drug that stopped people aging, they wouldn’t freeze their kids in time at three and five. Those are pain-in-the-arse ages. You might freeze your kids at, like, nine and eleven,” Zannah says to refute the idea that Thomas and Emily were part of a genetic experiment. But the simplest explanation they can think of—that the children are Thomas and Emily’s younger siblings—doesn’t quite add up. Why would Flora give all her children the same names? The question then becomes, how well did Beth really know the Braids? With a combination of social media stalking and amateur detective work, Beth tracks down Flora and her husband, Lewis, in both England and Florida and discovers that her old friends are leading double lives in more ways than one. Initially, the bond between the two women seems too weak to warrant such an intense search, but as Beth considers the problems that Flora might’ve been dealing with years ago that she hadn’t noticed, her curiosity thaws into genuine concern that turns her mission into a moral imperative.
Save a friendship, save a life—a surprising lesson for an unusual and absorbing thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297820-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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