A confusing attempt to blend romance with a police procedural and a hint of mystery, which doesn’t offer a convincing...
Small-town police officers tangle with criminals and one another in Graiko’s debut mixed-genre romance.
In this novel, a squad of five detectives struggles through a wide variety of cases, routinely castigated by the irritable Lt. Granger. The police spend an inordinate amount of time tossing sophomoric nicknames and offensive barbs at one another like wet hacky sacks. To add to their general professional displeasure, Trooper Laura Delorange is foisted on them because of some pesky affirmative-action problem. She’s beautiful and smart, with a tragic past. A Vermonter by birth and a graduate of the Columbia Law School, she’s despised by most of the department and knows it, but she tries to ignore the hazing and do the best possible job she can. She’s initially partnered with Detective Steve Scolarzski, a temperamental man with an equally tragic past, because the lieutenant in charge can’t fathom any romantic sparks igniting between the two. Nonetheless, the two are desperately in love from the outset, but they’re both too damaged and insecure to act on their feelings. The case that gets the plot moving involves another beautiful, smart woman who’s also madly attracted to Detective Scolarzski. But this woman, Stephanie Orsini, is conniving, duplicitous and downright evil. In the prologue, she flees a parking lot to avoid someone, gunning her engine to 65 mph, risking life and limb, while screaming at her whimpering, terrified 4-year-old: “Stop it! You’re not a baby anymore!” The ensuing accident brings all the characters together, as Orsini’s life is scrutinized and numerous crimes are committed, suspected and investigated. Perhaps in an attempt to spice up this cluttered romantic suspense novel, everyone seems to be preoccupied with sex 24/7. In the squad room, constant dirty jokes and innuendo are neither unwelcome nor surprising. But all interviews with suspects and conversations with people involved in the case devolve into remarkably unprofessional, unrealistic flirting and attempts at seduction. Most notably, Orsini is unflatteringly portrayed as a sex addict, a condition that motivates much of the book’s action.
A confusing attempt to blend romance with a police procedural and a hint of mystery, which doesn’t offer a convincing narrative or credible characters.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460956434
Page Count: 388
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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