A solid mystery far from DOA.
A body comes back to life on the autopsy table, igniting a string of events that includes murder, in the fourth novel featuring pathologist Toni Day.
It’s been one of those days for Day. She sees a car go into a canal and almost drowns herself trying to save the driver, a woman named Beulah, whom she actually knows. Later, just as Day is about to begin Beulah’s autopsy, she realizes that the woman is still alive. As she digs deeper into Beulah’s past, her investigation uncovers some apparent embezzlement occurring at the local canal company and the decades-old death of a young boy. She knows she’s getting uncomfortably close to pay dirt when she starts getting threats to back off. Will she find the truth before the threats turn deadly? Munro’s (Grievous Bodily Harm, 2013, etc.) novel takes the reader deep into the world of pathology, made popular by television shows like NCIS. The title comes from what has to be a pathologist’s worst nightmare—beginning an autopsy on a person who is still alive. Day is worried that she might have caused Beulah’s death because she inserted a needle into the heart cavity to draw some fluid out just before realizing that Beulah was still alive on the operating table. A pathologist herself for nearly four decades, Munro knows her way around an autopsy, and the book rings with authenticity yet doesn’t bury the reader in a blizzard of insider facts and tidbits. Day is no supersleuth but a typical working person doing a job that she’s good at, then letting her curiosity take control. A strong cast of supporting characters surrounds her, including a somewhat befuddled husband, her extended family and two dogs that act as living burglar alarms. The book is paced well, and every time the story flags, Munro tosses in action or an ominous sequence that reinvigorates the story and refocuses the reader. Readers may know in their heart of hearts that Day is too competent to cause a death, but this lively whodunit will keep them guessing until the end.
A solid mystery far from DOA.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491744796
Page Count: 268
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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