Pleasing characters and romantic interludes brighten an otherwise mundane mystery.
A Valentine’s Day fundraiser is loaded with surprises, including murder.
Callie Aspen gave up her job as a worldwide tour guide to help her great aunt Iphy run her tea shop in Heart’s Harbor, Maine. After several dangerous adventures revolving around Haywood Hall (Sweet Tea and Secrets, 2019, etc.), Callie and Iphy have been appointed to keep the stately home running as a venue for town activities. They’ve cooked up a fundraiser featuring a book swap and sale complete with an expert appraiser, an area to meet and greet shelter pets, and a concert. The arrival of Sean Strong from Vienna as a last-minute replacement for the baritone originally scheduled gives Iphy a shock she refuses to explain. And Callie’s careful plans are undermined when her friend Quinn upsets his girlfriend, Peggy, who drives off, leaving her kids behind. Then the assistant to librarian Mrs. Forrester tells Callie she’s found Mr. King, the book expert, dead. Callie calls her boyfriend, Deputy Ace Falk, to the scene. Ace, who already has his hands full with the sheriff out sick, is never happy when Callie meddles in murder. The evidence suggests that Mrs. Forrester may have stabbed King with a pair of scissors. Certainly the man was arrogant and rude, but was his behavior enough to drive a stranger to murder him? Ace is furious when he finds out that Quinn upset his sister Peggy, who really likes Quinn but can’t get over the death of her husband. Despite Ace’s disapproval of her activities, Callie can’t help sleuthing, especially when she finds out that King may have been cheating people in his appraisals. She also wants to get to the bottom of Iphy’s relationship with Strong, who soon becomes a murder suspect. Risking her relationship with Ace, Callie continues to search for clues and question anyone who might have answers in her hunt for the truth.
Pleasing characters and romantic interludes brighten an otherwise mundane mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64385-288-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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