What could possibly be the connection between the 1981 Soviet-sub-in-Sweden crisis (the prologue here) and the cops of the L.A.P.D.'s Rampart Station? That's the puzzle in the background that holds together, more or less, Wambaugh's latest, loosest grabbag of gross cop behavior, morgue slapstick, moody sleuthing, and black-comic misery. As usual, much time is spent in a cop hangout: this time it's Leery's Saloon, a.k.a. The House of Misery—where the "Bad Czech" (a dangerously yet lovably disturbed cop) delivers diatribes against Jerry Brown and others; where a cop near retirement counts the hours, terrified that something will go wrong; where the boozing and boogaloo-ing (with cop-groupies or Amazonian policewoman "Jane Wayne") is frantic; and where, most hilariously/disgustingly, the K-9 corps indulges too—in beer and sex-fantasies. But, while previous Wambaughs tended to center around the serious, alcoholic unhappiness of one or two characters, here the central cop—rather bland Detective Marie Villalobos—is only mildly depressed; and the prime off-and-on focus is instead on his murder investigation, the one that'll eventually link up to that USSR-sub affair. The murder victim: prostitute Missy Moonbeam. . . who, it seems, was somehow involved with a science-groupie pimp and a scientist from Caltech. (Among the leads: info from Missy's hysterical homosexual chum—and a stolen American Express card which the Bad Czech just happens to pick up by mistake in a Chinese restaurant.) So Villalobos and the Bad Czech are soon sleuthing on campus—with wildly funny culture clashes and the gradual exposure of a plan to influence, via blackmail, a Nobel Prize decision (already affected, you see, by the strained Sweden/USSR relations). Still, though Wambaugh's mystery-plot is more than serviceable, it's merely a frame for the glimpses of cop-misery (less effective than usual) and the ugly/goofy vignettes, which sometimes make The Hill Street Blues look like Heidi. (E.g., the Bad Czech's attempts to lynch a bum or pump all the blood out of a wounded suspect.) So, even more than before, it's hold on to your stomachs, forget about traditional police-novel satisfactions—and enjoy (if that's the word) Wambaugh's gritty, ghoulish flights of almost-fancy as a freeform side-show: sorely uneven, but undeniably vivid and occasionally inspired.
Pub Date: March 4, 1982
ISBN: 0553273868
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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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