The detective work is unspectacular but conscientious, absorbing, and believable, and the unblinking heroine’s clearheaded...
Upstate New York reporter Ellie Stone’s trip to a burning barn takes her outside her comfort zone in more ways than one.
Although Joshua Shaw made a name for himself back in the 1920s breeding and racing thoroughbreds, the Shaw family hasn’t used Tempesta Farm for years, and Ellie’s trip out there to cover a fire in one of the estate’s 40 barns one morning in August 1962 might have proved a waste of time if her poking amid the embers hadn’t disclosed two charred corpses. The victims seem well beyond identification, but the male has been shot, the female strangled, and the fire deliberately set. That’s plenty to interest readers of the New Holland Republic and maybe even publisher Artie Short, who still finds it hard to take a girl reporter seriously. Sheriffs from two different counties take an interest in the case, but it’s Ellie who digs up the leads that eventually identify the victims as Johnny Dornan, a jockey for Louis Fleischman’s Harlequin stables, and Vivian McLaglen, whose ties to Johnny go back a long way through some dark patches. Also missing is Micheline Charbonneau, a lady of the evening whom Lou had hired to entertain Johnny on what turned out to be his last night on Earth. A note Johnny left scrawled in a newspaper left behind in his lodgings—“Robinson S Friday midnight”—promises further illumination and, indeed, turns out to hold the key to the case, but few readers will decipher its import before Ellie. Tested by both her dogged pursuit of a story with deep roots and her relationship with Virginia aristocrat Frederick Carsten Whitcomb III, whose socialite mother turns out to be as anti-Semitic as his blue-blooded buddies, Ellie comes up trumps.
The detective work is unspectacular but conscientious, absorbing, and believable, and the unblinking heroine’s clearheaded first-person narrative is never less than appealing.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63388-419-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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