Leona's back! Lock the henhouse!
Leona Lindberg returns to wreak her peculiar havoc.
In the second installment of her adventures, Leona, a detective in the Violent Crimes Division of the Stockholm Police, continues her pursuit of a life outside all social conventions. In her first adventure (Leona: The Die Is Cast, 2017), she became aware that a conventional life was not for her and that nothing should be allowed to stand between her and her vision of freedom. That story then detailed her efforts to secure the kind of money she needed to step away from her life, an effort that cost her marriage, nearly cost her job, and contributed to the death of her son. Undeterred by these setbacks, Leona is back on her quest. But residual complications dog her steps now: She owes money to the gangster Armand; her relationships with her ex-husband and her daughter are frayed; she has been instructed to seek therapy (Leona! Therapy!); and her new boss, Alexandra, has assigned her the interrogation of a terrorist suspect. Leona's repayment scheme is quite ingenious: She runs a seminar in police practices and attitudes for midlevel career criminals, instructing them in ways to avoid detection and arrest. She is an excellent pedagogue, and her analyses of social issues as they impact criminals are fresh and acute. But the seminars alone can't generate the kind of money Leona needs, so using the attendees as a recruiting base, she puts together a gang and trains them for a truly major score. Meanwhile, the terrorist suspect is giving her fits, Armand has upped the pressure, and her boss's bosses are demanding answers. Much mayhem ensues. As a character, Leona asks a lot of the reader. She is savvy, decisive, and resourceful, in many ways admirable, but she is also relentlessly selfish, willing to inflict pain and misery to get what she wants. Her goal, which is a sort of socially dissociated island paradise, seems petty and ignoble. She differs from typical noir antiheroes—she's not a disappointed idealist but rather an amoral pragmatist. But never mind. This installment is more completely plotted and more involving than the first, and if Leona seems a little inhuman, well that's Leona being Leona.
Leona's back! Lock the henhouse!Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-884-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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