Twenty-eight years after NAACP stalwart Ely Dixon was killed, KKK alumnus Aaron Crown's finally convicted of his murder—and that's just the beginning of the trouble in Dave Robicheaux's Iberia Parish (Burning Angel, 1995, etc.). Against all reason, Crown protests his innocence, and the more Dave reads up on the crime, the less it seems to suit Crown's violent, impulsive nature. But standing up for Crown looks more and more like a sucker play when two filmmakers who've gotten interested in the case are murdered, and Dave's congratulated on turning a deaf ear on Crown's pleas by Giacano button man Mingo Bloomberg, who tells him he'll be taken care of for his trouble. Next day, Dave's sounded out about a high-level state police job by Buford LaRose, the plantation scion who's ridden his book on the Dixon murder to an LSU professorship and now has his eyes on the governor's mansion. Just in case he isn't getting the idea, Dave's warned off Crown's case by Jerry Joe Plumb, the flamboyant real-estate player who gets Mingo out of jail; for good measure, he's even attacked at his bait shop by a machete-wielding Mexican. Figuring Plumb must be using Mingo to pay off golden LaRose, Dave can't find the best way to approach the candidate, partly because his pushy wife, Karyn LaRose, is his own former lover. Meantime, Crown escapes, swearing vengeance on Governor LaRose, and Dave finds himself stuck on guard detail for Louisiana's First Family, though he's convinced the LaRoses somehow link Jerry Joe Plumb to Ely Dixon and his pimp/developer brother Jimmy Lee. Even as Dave struggles to put the pieces together, the survivors of a generation's worth of bad blood are still swinging away at each other like blind titans. Lacking the heaven-storming historical metaphors that have dominated Dave's last three cases, this one most recalls A Stained White Radiance (1992). Only Walter Mosley rivals Burke's ability to burrow so deeply into his detective's world that he creates a compelling sense of personal mythology.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7868-6175-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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