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CAST THE FIRST STONE

Ziskin’s nice-but-no-nonsense hero is out seriously past her depth in these fleshpots, where, as she aptly notes, she can’t...

An unsought assignment sends reporter Ellie Stone from upstate New York to Hollywood in the rainy month of February 1962.

New Holland doesn’t send many natives to La-La Land, and Ellie’s editor, Charlie Reese, thinks his readers will want to know how Tony Eberle is faring as the second lead in the monumental epic Twistin’ on the Beach. The answer is not well at all: he’s gone AWOL, Paramount has fired him from the picture, and he’ll never eat lunch in this town again. Foiled in her attempt to get the easy story, Ellie (Heart of Stone, 2016, etc.) grits her teeth and goes after the tough one, which depends on her finding Tony when no one else can. At first there’s little competition for the honor, because once he’s been let go, Tony is the lowest of the low, and no one cares where he is. But the news that Twistin’ producer Bertram Wallis has also disappeared along with the script he wrote for the film The Colonel’s Widow makes Paramount fixer Dorothy Fetterman much more interested in tracking down Tony. And when Wallis turns up dead in a ravine outside his hillside house’s deck, Sgt. John L. Millard, LAPD, joins the hunt. Ellie, who keeps swearing she just wants to meet William Hopper of Perry Mason fame, ends up nosing into every hiding spot in Los Angeles County in search of Tony, his girlfriend, April Kincaid, and that missing script. Her discovery of two out of the three leads to even deeper waters and the suspicion that everyone in Tinseltown is either gay or conspiring against her—except, possibly, for William Hopper.

Ziskin’s nice-but-no-nonsense hero is out seriously past her depth in these fleshpots, where, as she aptly notes, she can’t trust a single person. Readers will end up rooting for her to get sent back to the East Coast, where people just murder each other.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-63388-281-2

Page Count: 290

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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REMEMBER WHEN

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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