by Joy Avon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2019
Not much of a mystery, though there are plenty of suspicious characters, romantic overtones, and two delightful canines.
A suspicious handyman, a cold case, and a current murder leave a former tour guide confused but determined.
Callie Aspen is back in Heart's Harbor, Maine, to help her great-aunt Iphy with her literary-themed tea shop and her responsibilities maintaining magnificent Haywood Hall as a venue for activities. Iphy rents her a fixer-upper cottage and puts up a notice for a handyman. It’s answered by Quinn, a complete stranger whom at least Callie's Boston terrier, Daisy, likes. Conflicted about her decision to move and give up a job she loved, Callie recalls her Christmas visit (In Peppermint Peril, 2018), when she and Deputy Falk hit it off, and wishes he hadn’t cooled off. When Falk shows up looking for a missing border collie, they find him together, but Callie temporarily hands the dog over to Quinn since the owners no longer want it. Callie has offered to organize her great-aunt's Fourth of July tea party, and Quinn suggests she read back issues of the local paper to find material for the "living history" theme; that's how she finds a story from 1989 about the mysterious disappearance of actress Monica Walker, whose stay at the Cliff Hotel was troubled by a former lover hounding her. Monica and a fishing boat vanished, never to be found. Did she sail off, or was she murdered? Journalist Joe Jamison fobs off Callie and Quinn with platitudes but later admits to Callie that he knows things he’s unwilling to share with Quinn. When Jamison turns up murdered, Quinn’s furious with Callie for making him a suspect. For her part, she’s angered by all the lies he’s told her. Intrigued by the long-missing actress, Callie interviews everyone she can find who was around when she vanished and wonders whether the secrets she’s unearthed will lead to a conclusion or another death.
Not much of a mystery, though there are plenty of suspicious characters, romantic overtones, and two delightful canines.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64385-023-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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by Joy Avon
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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