With sparkling wit, Southern charm, and a steady pace, Miss Lilly has hit her stride.
Lloyd’s (Home Is Where Your Boots Are, 2015) second book in the MisAdventures of Miss Lilly series finds small-town lawyer Lilly Atkins kicking herself after shooting her ex-boyfriend in the foot.
With Cash Stetson in rehab, Lilly might also need therapy to get through a divorce case that brings back unhappy memories of both her cowardly ex-boyfriend and her cheating ex-fiance. Veronica Kellner’s husband is leaving her, and she needs Lilly’s help to secure her children’s inheritance after he’s gone. Soon, Lilly is bruised and bloodied in a series of mishaps—some accidental, some self-inflicted—while she investigates the couple’s secrets. As the danger escalates, Lilly finds that “the best place to find grace is with the people that know all the bad stuff you’ve done.” Lilly is as brazen as ever, and her gaggle of loudmouthed friends ride shotgun as she gossips, trespasses, and steals to get the information she needs while local law officials look the other way. Some clues are laugh-out-loud funny—like the telltale nightie that implicates a woman’s fiance in a crime worse than cheating—and dead bodies are thrown like pies in the face of justice. Lawyer and “former Yankee FBI agent” Spencer Locke, whose uncle Charlie represents Mr. Kellner in the divorce settlement, is powerless to keep Lilly out of trouble when the right side of the law is whatever side she’s standing on at any given moment. Lilly says Spencer is “as bad as Gladys Cobb’s perfume”: “Nauseously permeating and infinitely irritating”—or at least irritating enough to hint at romance without overwhelming the plot. In the previous book, Lilly’s cases piled up on her desk while she cataloged her long history with her hometown friends; in this sequel, each of her new cases feeds into the next until the evidence shows how they are all connected. It’s a formula in which every ingredient has been perfectly measured, and it works. Still, readers who are new to the series could start with this book and quickly catch up.
With sparkling wit, Southern charm, and a steady pace, Miss Lilly has hit her stride.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lloyd Words
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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