An often clever mystery about a dysfunctional family going downhill.
Spending the holidays with family can be murder in Moore’s (Murder at the Country Club, 2018, etc.) contemporary cozy mystery.
Sally Braddock has been a widow for six years, and she lives on a 17-acre estate that’s so high up in the mountains above Vail, Colorado, that there’s no cellphone service. Now in her late 50s, she keeps in shape by swimming daily in her outdoor pool, regardless of the weather. Her businessman husband left her more than $3 billion and three spoiled, grown children. All the 30-something kids claim poverty, despite their multimillion-dollar trust funds, due to extravagant purchases (daughter Gwen owns an armada of luxury boats), ill-advised investing (son Lance funds movies for his actress/centerfold wife, Yvette), or snorting cocaine and gambling (favorite child Stephen is just out of rehab). Encouraged by their spouses, the siblings all ask Sally for more money during their annual Christmas visit. Upset, she screams that she plans to give 95 percent of her money to a charitable foundation. Her only true friend seems to be her devoted live-in housekeeper, Helga. After a winter storm knocks out the phone lines and internet service and blocks the road, one of the Braddocks is murdered—but was the deceased the intended victim? The next night brings another attack as well as news that someone has gone missing. Moore offers several twists and red herrings over the course of the novel, and she populates the well-paced mystery with a slew of imperfect characters. There are a few bits of characterization that readers may find difficult to believe, such as Gwen’s paying $50,000 for a purple purse. However, Moore’s depiction of the shadowy Helga is reminiscent of that of Daphne du Maurier’s Mrs. Danvers in the classic novel Rebecca. The book’s swimming and skiing scenes, which turn out to be crucial to the plot, benefit from the fact that the author is a former sportswriter: “The next run they tackled wasn’t as long, but it had a lot of challenging moguls. Gwen slowed down a bit, trying to figure out better ways to maneuver over the undulating hills.”
An often clever mystery about a dysfunctional family going downhill.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5390-3850-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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