Fans of this brilliant series will not be disappointed by the murder mystery or the big reveal of its heroine's motivation...
A woman determined to atone and make a difference returns to her drug-plagued hometown.
Bell Elkins was born poor in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, and her life has been through many phases (Fast Falls the Night, 2017, etc.). She married, became a lawyer and a mother and led a life of wealth, then divorced and returned home as a tough and determined prosecuting attorney. The revelation that her sister, Shirley, had terminal cancer, and moreover that she had spent years in prison for killing their abusive father while knowing that 10-year-old Bell was guilty of the crime, even if young Bell didn't realize it herself, sent Bell’s life into a tailspin. None of her family and friends can fathom why Bell insisted on serving her own prison term for her father’s murder when the powers that be would have been happy with a slap on the wrist considering all the mitigating circumstances. Now Bell is back in town trying to decide what to do with her life as she is no longer a lawyer. With the whole state ravaged by opioids, her first thought is to work to hold drug companies morally if not legally responsible, but then she becomes involved in the town's latest drug-related murder. Banker Brett Topping and his wife, Ellie, are at their wits' end trying to save their addicted son, Tyler. Rehab has failed numerous times, and now he's home and stealing their possessions to feed his habit. Ellie is so desperate that she's decided to kill Tyler, but before she can get up the nerve, her husband is shot dead in their driveway. Both Ellie and Tyler have alibis, and Tyler insists it was Deke Foley, the dealer he worked for, whom Brett had threatened to turn in to the police along with "dates, times, places, license plate numbers." The sheriff and prosecutor, desperately short-handed, hire both Bell and a paralyzed former deputy to help with this latest case. Old friends pitch in, and nasty secrets are revealed, but the big question is still why Bell insisted on going to prison.
Fans of this brilliant series will not be disappointed by the murder mystery or the big reveal of its heroine's motivation for trashing her life.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19092-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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