A complex and intense mystery featuring a companionable cast.
A retired lawyer spends his days painting, drinking wine, and narrowly escaping death in Lively’s thriller sequel.
After Charles Pierce retired from his law practice, he began painting and finally enjoying quiet time. All that changed, however, when a widow named Jamie tried to poison him, due to the fact that an insurance company—one of Charles’ clients—denied a claim; Lively wrote about these events in Aberrant Behavior (2020). Now, Jamie has apparently killed a hotel employee, and Charles has to deal with the gruff Detective Gonzales. Meanwhile, Charles has also been asked to do some pro bonowork for the Contemporary Dallas Art Dealers Association; this leads him to meet the vibrant Sam, who owns a Dallas art gallery where Charles soon begins a renting a studio. Painting and entertaining in the studio is wonderful—at first. Then Charles’ life is once again turned upside down when a mysterious figure tries to shoot him while he’s leaving the place one night. Then, to make matters even worse, someone’s stalking Charles’ friend Rachel, claiming that he knows Charles. Overall, this is an engaging and suspenseful sequel, and it’s also one that works well as a stand-alone. There are a great many plot threads, but two main stories stand out: Jamie’s trial and trying to seek forgiveness from Charles and perhaps grow as a person; and the mystery of the shooter and a series of crimes that all seem to have a direct connection to Charles. For the most part, the protagonist is pleasant and relatable throughout, although his reactions to some of the more momentous events feel implausibly restrained. Other characters, such as Jamie, Detective Gonzales, Sam, and Rachel, are more entertaining and create a pleasant atmosphere amid all the suspense.
A complex and intense mystery featuring a companionable cast.Pub Date: June 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-943658-69-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Treaty Oak Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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
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