Gritty neo-noir with an all-too-plausible speculative twist.
A San Francisco PI gets much more than he bargains for when he’s asked to investigate the suspicious death of a wealthy young woman.
Ex-attorney–turned–private investigator Lee Crowe hasn’t lacked for jobs in the six years since he was disbarred for beating the stuffing out of his now ex-wife’s lover, a California Supreme Court associate justice. In fact, most of his jobs in his early days as a PI came from his ex-boss attorney Jim Gardner, who likely has a finger in plenty of the city’s dirtiest deeds. When Crowe happens upon the body of a beautiful young woman on the caved-in roof of a Rolls Royce Wraith parked in front of the decidedly down-market Refugio Apartments, he can’t resist snapping photos for a quick tabloid sale. Jim spots the photo and offers Crowe another job. The dead woman is 20-year-old Claire Gravesend, and her mother, the wealthy and influential Olivia Gravesend, doesn’t believe Claire committed suicide. Crowe has Olivia’s considerable resources to back up his investigation, and he’ll need them. He flies to Boston to examine Claire's home, where he has a violent encounter with a knife-wielding intruder. Shaken, he returns to San Francisco, where he discovers that Claire's secret pied-à-terre is hiding something even stranger: a woman in Claire’s bed who looks just like Claire and shares the strange circular scars on her spine that appeared on Claire’s autopsy photos. Shocked but undeterred and not afraid to get his hands dirty, Crowe seeks answers from Olivia’s mother and Claire’s doppelgänger in a case that’s shaping up to be stranger than fiction. Moore's rough-and-tumble PI operates firmly in varying shades of gray; the author delivers enough action and atmosphere to satisfy readers who like their gumshoes old-school while having a lot to say about humankind’s hubris and preoccupation with eternal youth. The mastermind behind Claire’s death is truly vile, and the disturbing finale will linger. Luckily, Moore sets things up for a sequel.
Gritty neo-noir with an all-too-plausible speculative twist.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-98781-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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