A stay-up-late-until-it’s-finished mystery with pitch-perfect dialogue, a Southern sexy feel, and empathetic characters on...
In rapid-fire succession, two disappearances and two seemingly unrelated crimes come to the attention of a Tennessee sheriff in this fifth installment of a series.
First, middle-aged Mavis Rutledge, estranged wife of wealthy entrepreneur Emmet Rutledge, is reported missing. Emmet’s known for having recent money trouble, and upon investigation, Sheriff Jonas Lauer learns he has other issues. “A man who has been using drugs, gambling, and is now carrying a gun,” Lauer observes, noting that those three things “rarely ever mix well together.” Still it’s a surprise when a blood-soaked but corpseless scene is discovered on the sailboat Mavis has lived on since splitting from her husband. Then Emmet also vanishes. As does something else—the Veterans Memorial’s 91-pound, 30-by-60-foot flag has been taken hostage for $10,000. No doubt the theft came to life courtesy of a City Hall employee’s pillow talk about the high cost of the flag to a prostitute he paid with stolen municipal funds. Finally something is found, not lost: but it’s a semi delivering to area food marts, and it holds more than pallets of baking ingredients—it’s also packed with heroin. “The Dixie Mafia,” a syndicate that operates “throughout the South,” underpins all these incidents. Mark Russell, an educated and unusual member of the mob, seems to be pulling the strings, or is he just struggling to survive a new crime boss? Regardless, he taunts Lauer with phone calls and questions about his parents and his upcoming nuptials to his fiancee, Lydia Corbett, an investigator for the attorney general’s office. As the body count rises, brief summaries of previous books in this excellent series arrive organically. The pacing roller-coasters from stretches of calm to accelerated heights and unexpected turns, with the occasional inversion of a character or theory. The vibrant dialogue and landscape seem ripe for a quality cable TV miniseries. Hester (The House of Cards Murder, 2016, etc.) writes an engaging, realistic mystery with strong characters, but the real puzzle is why a writer so talented can’t find an editor who can fix the book’s rampant comma errors and other mistakes. Case in point: main character Emmet’s name is spelled alternatingly Emmet and Emmett, sometimes on the same page.
A stay-up-late-until-it’s-finished mystery with pitch-perfect dialogue, a Southern sexy feel, and empathetic characters on both sides of the law.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974143-17-7
Page Count: 436
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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