Characters both sympathetic and vile and a neat, mean, little mystery rescue the story from well-intended but bombastic...
A TV journalist’s rising star is knocked sideways when she returns to her small hometown to clean up her late father’s unfinished business.
Richards (A Most Uncommon Journey, 2000, etc.) starts her murder mystery cum political broadside on a deathbed. Cassie Danforth’s father, a much admired newspaper editor, is about to expire. He asks Cassie to return home and take the reins of the paper. Lastly, he cryptically whispers, “It… begins… here.” Cassie is ambivalent, but she heeds her father’s wishes, including learning the meaning of his final words. Richards lovingly, chromatically evokes the atmosphere of a small, well-preserved North Carolina town, its bosky precincts—the courthouse square, the outlying plantation houses—as well as its ugly underbelly; it’s always a delightful surprise, bookwise, to discover the depravity lurking in the most genteel settings, and Richards plays the card with finesse. A dashing stranger comes to town, Cooper Canaday (revealed to be running for a U.S. Senate seat and looking to tidy up some unfinished business of his own), whose soon-to-blossom romantic interest in Cassie develops in a most chivalrous fashion. Embracing the whole tale is the creation of a third national political party, which Cooper, Linwood Johnson (a local football hero turned college professor) and a handful of poobahs wish Cassie to join. This political party is where the story meets a hiccup. It’s not enough for readers to be told the nation’s political system is a viper’s nest of greed, arrogance and self-indulgence, and Richards provides few platform particulars of the third party on which to hang your hat. Richards presents great characters, suffusing each with a robust personality, so their lapses into speechifying feel especially wayward: “Obstinate, unyielding personalities equate to stalemate while the country flounders. There are solutions, and those solutions will take courage,” Linwood woodenly says at one point. Meanwhile, the third-party’s leader leaves readers wondering just why he got the post. Still, Richards handles the mystery with aplomb, teasing the crime into greater darkness and the shadow players into ever increasing menace.
Characters both sympathetic and vile and a neat, mean, little mystery rescue the story from well-intended but bombastic political philosophizing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450256391
Page Count: 268
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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