In spite of Claire’s sardonic wit and the Hollows’ zaniness, Hess’ latest is all too predictable, bringing sad truth to...
Finding her dream house turns into a nightmare for Arkansas bookseller Claire Malloy (Damsels in Distress, 2007, etc.).
Now that she and hunky deputy police chief Peter Rosen are back from their honeymoon in Egypt, Claire’s two-bedroom apartment seems a mite small to house both the happy couple and Claire’s daughter Caron. So rather than forcing the moody 17-year-old to move in with her bookish best friend Inez, Claire leaves the Book Depot in the hands of her earnest young clerk and goes off with real estate agent Angela Delmond to plow through Farberville’s meager housing stock. Just as Claire finds a beautiful restored Victorian backing onto a meadow, Angela disappears, stranding her client in her dream house. Worse yet, as she tries to complete the deal sans realtor, Claire finds the title to the house shrouded in conflict. Before his fatal plunge into the creek, Winston Hollow left it to his gay lover, Terry Kennedy. Naturally, the Hollow clan is disputing the will. Although his wife, flaky Pandora Butterfly Saraswati, couldn’t care less about material possessions, organic farmer Ethan Hollow sees Winston’s property as the Hollows’ birthright. Righteous Charles Finnelly, related by marriage to Ethan’s cousin Felicia, is less concerned with legacy than with losing the land to a godless pervert. Gentle Nattie is torn. She wants the family estate to stay intact but would love a neighbor like Claire to relieve the tedium of caring for her demented Uncle Moses. But it won’t be enough to win over the Hollows; in order to buy the house, Claire will need to solve a string of murders.
In spite of Claire’s sardonic wit and the Hollows’ zaniness, Hess’ latest is all too predictable, bringing sad truth to Claire’s constant refrain: “if this were a mystery novel...”Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-36362-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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