A fast-paced mystery that provides a chilling look at how difficult it is to get rid of a stalker.
A librarian and her friends must solve a murder to ensure that she’ll live long enough to get married.
Lindsey Norris and her fiance, Capt. Mike Sullivan, are planning a small wedding on one of the Thumb Islands near the town of Briar Creek, Connecticut, where Lindsey is the library director and Sully runs a charter boat business (Hitting the Books, 2018, etc.). All Lindsey’s plans are jeopardized by an innocuous middle-aged man who turns up at the library seeking information on roses. New to the area, Aaron Grady fears that his rose garden won’t survive the drought that’s searing the area. In response to Lindsey’s assistance, Grady sends her a thank-you note. Then he turns up with a bunch of roses, waiting two hours and quizzing the staff, who all agree that he seems unnaturally fixated on her. When Grady turns up at her house with more roses, she firmly tells him their relationship is limited to that of a librarian and a library patron. Apparently shocked, he leaves her, her friend Beth, and Beth’s husband, Aidan, whom she called before opening the door, to explain to an annoyed Sully what’s been going on. Grady continues to stalk Lindsey, even watching her try on wedding dresses. Sully and Robbie Vine, an actor who knows a thing or two about stalkers, teach the library staff some self-defense moves, and Robbie’s girlfriend, police chief Emma Plewicki, adds a few tips, but nobody can stop Grady from making Lindsey’s life hell. The stalking ends only when Grady turns up dead outside the library, leaving Lindsey and Sully prime suspects. Grady’s wife, Sylvia, accuses Lindsey of trying to steal her husband and Sully of murdering him. It will take all the research skills of Lindsey and her staff to uncover the real motive for the murder.
A fast-paced mystery that provides a chilling look at how difficult it is to get rid of a stalker.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-10003-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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