Murder stalks a go-getting San Francisco lawyer who just wants to be left alone so he can have it all. From the moment Mark Dooher first catches sight of law student Christina Carrera, he's convinced that he's got to have her. There are obstacles, of course: His old friend and colleague Wes Farrell disapproves; Christina's boyfriend works for Mark's own firm; and neither Mark's wife Sheila nor his principal employer, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, would care for the idea if Mark ever brought it up. Instead, he finagles Christina into the firm and promotes her boyfriend to oblivion in L.A., pooh-poohs Wes's objections, and keeps Sheila and the Archbishop in the dark. Everything goes fine until a pesky lawyer who's threatened to attach the Archbishop's name to a scandalous lawsuit gets stabbed to death shortly after turning down the hefty settlement Mark had been authorized to offer, and Sgt. Abe Glitsky fastens on Mark as the killer. Despite Glitsky's certainty, there's no physical evidence linking Mark to the murder, and the weight of the Archdiocese is able to keep the case from going to trial. Glitsky does arrest Mark two months later, however, when Sheila dies in an apparent robbery attempt. The sides are clear-cut: Christina, who joins Wes at the defense table at Mark's request, is absolutely certain Mark couldn't have done it; Glitsky is equally certain that he did (but then he's maddened with grief over the agonizing death of his wife). It'll all come out in court, right? Not exactly—because as the title indicates, the usually reliable Lescroart (A Certain Justice, 1995, etc.) wants to explore the dissonance between legal and actual guilt. The exploration, though, is surprisingly ham-handed and overextended, mainly because the author himself can't quite decide how guilty to make his protagonist look, and the richly promising gallery of characters has nothing to do but wait for a shrilly melodramatic finale. ($125,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-31655-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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