A solid opener to a proposed series that’s at its winsome best when its sleuths share the spotlight.
In Sinisi’s debut murder mystery, the discovery of a dead body in a Catholic church shocks a community.
When investment analyst Drew Bresson’s body turns up in a confessional at Saint Brigit’s, Detective Peter Guthrie brings in his pal Steve Garvin, a criminology professor who also works as a police consultant and profiler. Both Bresson and the church were robbed, but it seems that Bresson’s murder was the true aim. There’s no shortage of probable killers; suspects include Bresson’s wife, Diana, who’d had an affair; his co-worker and mistress, Hilda Xavier; and his affluent client Mike Reilly and investment broker Vincent Tindari, both of whom he’d accused of illicit or immoral conduct. The possible motives are also numerous, as the victim was often quick to point out the poor ethics of others. There’s a break in the case, however, with the arrival of an anonymous letter—which is followed by a second murder. Much of Sinisi’s novel reads like a police report, summarizing witness statements, evidence gathering, and Guthrie’s and Garvin’s conjectures. This sometimes makes the narrative feel mechanical, but it also allows for methodical examination: The investigators scrutinize every possibility, even looking into associates of the suspects, such as Diana’s lover and Tindari’s wife. Sinisi also manages to insert some emotion into the investigation: As Garvin develops feelings for Diana, Guthrie has him argue a theoretical case against her so that he’ll remain objective. Some of the duo’s rationales aren’t always clear; at one point, for example, they believe that a “sex group” involved drugs and minors, despite no evidence to support that belief. However, watching the two men debate every aspect of the case is a sheer delight, and the author smartly avoids flagrant signs of smoking guns.
A solid opener to a proposed series that’s at its winsome best when its sleuths share the spotlight.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499722932
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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