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RED SUNSET DRIVE

A solid mystery featuring otherworldly good and bad guys, which primes its readers for future series entries.

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In the second installment of Walters’ (York Street, 2014, etc.) supernatural-thriller series, a police detective and his ghostly relative go up against vampires in Des Moines, Iowa.

Detective Brett O’Shea’s no stranger to the supernatural. He previously tracked a not-quite-human serial killer with the aid of his great-grandfather Detective Michael O’Shea—who’s been dead for more than 80 years. But Brett has trouble believing the story of Historical Preservation Society president John Allen, who claims that, following his discovery of 14th-century tombs, vampires are now loose in the city. John’s only real piece of evidence was a severed, bloodless finger that’s mysteriously vanished. Dead, drained bodies, however, do turn up with their throats ripped apart. Brett tries to prevent John from publicly attributing these additional murders to vampires and inciting a panic. But he’s also leery when he meets a pale gentleman named Dragos Eldridge. It turns out that Dragos only recently awakened after two centuries with a newfound thirst for the red stuff. His family and friends are all long dead, and his undeniable misery generates sympathy from Brett and Michael, who take him on as a houseguest. But if Dragos isn’t behind the killings, the detectives will need to find and stop the other vampires who may be out there. This novel’s combination of adult sequences and YA–style moments can be bizarre at times; vampire violence and short, explicit sex scenes, for example, coexist with a scene of Brett taunting Dragos with loud kissing sounds when he’s on the phone with a new love interest. Nevertheless, a sense of slow but unmistakable menace galvanizes the plot, which further saddles Brett with a personal dilemma: his reporter girlfriend Lisa Winslow’s new job offer could be the catalyst for a breakup. As in the preceding novel in the series, Michael makes the most of his appearances, typically scaring other characters when he suddenly materializes among them. His old-school ways (including a perpetually worn fedora) and sometimes-antiquated vernacular (such as calling Lisa “Missy”) are consistently charming.

A solid mystery featuring otherworldly good and bad guys, which primes its readers for future series entries.

Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1117-7

Page Count: 410

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: April 24, 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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THE WINNER

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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