The elegant writing, complex characters, and surprising conclusion of Thomas’ second (The English Boys, 2016) all add up to...
A cold case turns hot enough to burn lives to the ground.
DCI Robert McIntyre has come from the Cornwall town of Truro to spend Christmas with his brother’s family in London. Still depressed over the departure of his lover, Alison Kendall, whose first novel has become a bestseller, he finds his brother's house empty—David and his family have been called away—and is startled when Iris Flynn shows up on the doorstep in the middle of the night saying she's flown halfway around the world to help him find her daughter’s killer. The Flynns were living in Truro when their eldest daughter, Sophie, disappeared along with her nanny, Karen Peterson, more than a year earlier. Sophie's body was found in the river the next day, and Karen hasn't been seen since. Before this traumatic episode, Iris and Nick, her Australian husband, had led a peripatetic existence, moving from country to country: "It's Nick," Iris says. "The world is too small for him." It was in Oregon, their last stop before Britain, that they met Karen, who asked if she could come with them and help out with the kids. Now, unable to recover from Sophie’s death, Iris has left Nick and their two other daughters with her sister in Australia in a desperate bid to find the truth. The only new clue the police have is a psychic who claims to have had a vision of Karen in London. The police artist makes a sketch based on the psychic's description that Iris doesn’t think looks like Karen, but after watching hours of CCTV she picks her former nanny out of the crowd boarding a London train. The passport service, however, finds no record of a Karen Peterson ever having entered the U.K. Even though Iris has an estranged mother and brother in Cornwall, she winds up staying with McIntyre when they return to Truro; he feels desperately sorry for the woman whose life has been torn apart and finds her company comforting in his loneliness. Unable to forget Alison, he's taken aback when the case takes a strange and unsettling turn and involves his former love in a way he cannot ignore no matter how painful the results. At length more clues emerge, and when Iris does go to see her mother, a chance encounter brings the case to disconcerting new life.
The elegant writing, complex characters, and surprising conclusion of Thomas’ second (The English Boys, 2016) all add up to a fine mystery that will appeal to readers of Catriona McPherson’s psychological thrillers.Pub Date: July 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5250-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
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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