A much improved mystery, a touch of history, and the obligatory romance combine for a pleasing read.
A time-traveling FBI agent is more celebrated for her forensic skills than her social ones.
Even though it’s no picnic to be stuck in 1816 England, Kendra Donovan is fortunate to have become the ward of the Duke of Aldridge, who passes her off as the daughter of an old friend and the lover of his nephew, Alexander Morgan, the Marquis of Sutcliffe, who is indeed keen to marry her. Both men, fascinated by her knowledge, try to help her adjust to a very different world in which her outspokenness often lands her in trouble. Having already solved one murder case (Caught in Time, 2018), she’s a natural choice for Bow Street Runner Sam Kelly to call on when Sir Giles Holbrooke is found naked with his tongue cut out in an abandoned church. Sir Giles was both a spymaster and an adviser to the prince regent, and his death is sure to cause shock waves. His body was covered with a crosslike symbol written in invisible ink that became visible only when the heat of the lanterns used during his autopsy brought them out. Reporter Phineas Muldoon hints that politics and the Irish problem may be involved. Then again, Gerard Holbrooke, a spoiled young man deep in debt, may have killed his father to escape being shipped off to India. The sleuths discover that Sir Giles’ long friendship with the family of apothecary Bertel Larson ended in disaster when Sir Giles convinced their brilliant son Evert to spy for him and he was killed in an incident in France that left Lord Eliot Cross and Capt. Hugh Mobray the only survivors. Kendra finds both the parents and their son David bitter over Evert’s death. When Cross is murdered in the same way as Sir Giles, the members of the Larson family become prime suspects. But Kendra senses something fishy about the story of how Evert died and knows she must dig deeper in search of the truth.
A much improved mystery, a touch of history, and the obligatory romance combine for a pleasing read.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-074-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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