The laughs keep coming with Riley and her network of all-but-unbelievable co-stars, though the mystery plot could be trimmed...
When a fun but flawed obituary writer investigates her subject, she finds that his death might not be as straightforward as she thought.
The first person Tabitha St. Simon calls when she finds the body of her future father-in-law, Dr. Arthur Davenport, is Riley Ellison, her former co-worker at the Tuttle Corner Library and the Tuttle Times’ latest obituarist. Tabitha’s less concerned with what Riley will write than with what Riley might do for her. She’s seen Riley do some solid informal investigating recently (The Good Byline, 2017), and she’s certain that Riley can clear her fiance, Thad, of complicity in Arthur’s murder, even if it’s Thad’s knife sticking out of Arthur’s chest. Riley isn’t close with bridezilla Tabitha, but she knows that if she wants to give Arthur’s obituary the time and thought it deserves, she should learn all she can about him, especially if that might promote her story from the obituary section to the front page. And Riley welcomes the distraction from her personal life. She’s known around town as the girl whose boyfriend, Ryan, left after years together only to knock up the first girl he met, beautiful and improbably named Ridley, and now both Ryan and Ridley are back in town. Ridley is settling in to give birth any day; Ryan, dedicated enough to future fatherhood, claims that Ridley was a blip and is desperate to get Riley back. Riley’s not interested in giving Ryan a second chance, partly because she can’t believe anyone would leave the perfect Ridley, partly because Riley has a real relationship of her own. Now that she’s been set up with Jay via the hilariously overbearing and invasive matchmaking service Click.com, the two are living their best millennial lives together, evidenced by Riley’s accidental and automatic enrollment in Bestmilleniallife.com, which has brought her together with Personal Success Concierge™ and Beyoncé enthusiast Jenna B.
The laughs keep coming with Riley and her network of all-but-unbelievable co-stars, though the mystery plot could be trimmed without abating the otherwise high shine.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945551-32-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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