NEXT OF KIN

Name: NEXT OF KIN
Author: James Tucker
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4566-7

by James Tucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2017

Direct and fast-paced, Tucker’s debut takes readers on an adventurous ride that extends from questions about custody of a...

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A detective is pressed into guarding a 10-year-old boy who’s the last surviving member of his family.

NYPD detective Buddy Lock is surprised when lawyer Ray Sawyer calls him and asks for his help solving the murder of a family upstate. Buddy’s jurisdiction is limited to Manhattan, and though he’s flattered that Ray would want his help, he doesn’t think he knows anything that might solve the New Year’s killings of virtually an entire branch of the wealthy Brook family. Even so, Buddy agrees to look into the case along with his brother Ward Mills, an expert in safe houses and human behavior. While they investigate Camp Kateri, the site of the murders, Ray is asked to care for the last remaining Brook, Ben, who somehow managed to escape while his parents and sister were killed. Whoever murdered the rest of Ben’s family comes after him while he’s in Ray’s care, and though Ben survives, the lawyer's wife is killed in the attack. Convinced that the killer will stop at nothing until he’s dead, Ben begs Buddy to keep him safe. Buddy agrees to bring him to the home he shares with his girlfriend, Mei. The two work round-the-clock to care for Ben and keep him safe, and Mei bonds with the traumatized boy, offering him mothering while he’s most vulnerable. Buddy and Ward do their part by researching the Brook family tree to find out who might have something to gain by killing the eponymous next of kin.

Direct and fast-paced, Tucker’s debut takes readers on an adventurous ride that extends from questions about custody of a young charge to an art deal that may have its roots in the exploitation of Jews in World War II.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5420-4566-7

Page Count: 348

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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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)