The guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
Rouda hits the ground running and never stops in this cage battle, fueled by resentment and rage, between a wealthy CEO’s first and second wives.
The meeting to celebrate the initial public offering of EventCo, the highly successful social-arrangement corporation founded by John and Kate Nelson, is a festive celebration that barely conceals the simmering rivalry between Kate and John’s second wife, Tish, who’s only four years older than his daughter, college senior Ashlyn. No sooner have the corks been popped than Tish triumphantly whisks her exhausted husband off from the Columbus suburb of Grandville to their house in Telluride for a weekend away that John never returns from. More precisely, he returns in an urn after Tish, defying his long-standing burial plans, orders his remains cremated following his fatal heart attack. Now that John’s dead, you might think the war between his two wives would wind down. In the practiced hands of Rouda, though, hostilities continue to heat up. Both wives jockey to line up influential allies at the funeral. Each wife tries to get the other one ejected from EventCo’s headquarters. Each produces a will tilted heavily in her favor. And when Ashlyn, whom Tish befriended in an attempt to move up the ladder after she was hired as John’s executive assistant, makes it clear that she stands with her mother, Tish digs deeper into her nefarious bag of tricks. The clash of these titans, whose superpowers would make them right at home in the comic-book universe if they’d just turn in their designer outfits for masks and capes, is so much fun that you’ll be sorry to see it end with a final pair of zingers.
The guiltiest of guilty pleasures.Pub Date: May 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2594-2
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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
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