The second entry in this charming series poses no great challenges for mystery buffs but is peopled with plenty of...
A Welsh nun with a passion for murder investigations sees every suspicious death as a case to solve.
Sister Agatha of Gwenafwy Abbey reads detective fiction and watches Midsomer Murders, and she’s also busy writing a murder mystery of her own. Agatha already has a claim to fame since helping solve a murder at the abbey (The Shadow of Death, 2018). Now the villagers of Pryderi are in a bother over plans to build housing in a lovely meadow between the village and the abbey, but even that outrage is put aside when Tiffany Reese, the very model of annoying perfection, is found dead in the church hall with the painting she’d planned to enter in the annual art show—where she'd won first prize last year—gone missing. Constable Barnes, who thinks Tiffany had a heart attack, refuses to do an autopsy, but Sister Agatha, knowing how many enemies Tiffany had made with her high-handed ways, starts her own investigation with the help of Father Selwyn and some of the nuns at the abbey. Even the abbey’s paying guest, young artist Lucy Pennoyer, gets dragged into the investigation when her dog is stolen and left in a crate in a frozen field. There are too many suspects for Agatha, who labors to find alibis and motives. Strange notes with Wizard of Oz references left for Lucy only raise the stakes as Agatha tries to keep up with the abbey’s pre-Christmas cheese orders while hunting down a killer.
The second entry in this charming series poses no great challenges for mystery buffs but is peopled with plenty of interesting characters and local color.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-759-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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