A quick, fun read with engaging rodeo scenes.
Murder and mayhem strike Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in St. Louis right after Annie Oakley and her horse, Buck, join the entourage.
It’s 1885, and 15-year-old Annie Mosey is an instant sensation during a competition in Greenville, Ohio, with the famous sharpshooter Frank Butler. Watching the performance are “Buffalo Bill” Cody, aka “the Colonel,” and Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, who entice Annie to join the Colonel’s Wild West Show, which is on its way to the city for a four-week engagement. They change her last name to Oakley, and Sitting Bull calls her “Watanya Cecilia” (“Little Miss Sure Shot”). It’s all quite overwhelming for the Quaker girl, who’s been supporting her mother and two younger siblings with her hunting prowess. Annie shares a tent with Kimimela (nicknamed “Kimi”), a young Sioux girl, and her infant daughter, and they quickly bond. But there are enemies lurking: the Colonel’s mistress, a Roma woman named Twila Midnight, who’s been hostile from the start, and a new addition to the show, sharpshooter Lillian “Lillie” Smith, who’s Twila’s adopted sister. One night, Annie returns to her tent after a dinner celebration and discovers Kimi’s dead body. Although Kimi is only 14, the local coroner rules it a death by natural causes. Annie is convinced that Kimi has been murdered, but what could be the motive? Bovée’s debut novel brings readers solidly into the heyday of the Wild West shows, providing wonderful details about the elaborate costumes and the characters’ remarkable marksmanship: Frank shoots a playing card out of Annie’s hand, and she shoots a cigarette out of his mouth. The love-hate relationship between Annie and Frank is based on historical fact, although the timetable for some of the events here is altered for dramatic effect. The mystery, too, is a product of Bovée’s imagination; Kimi’s murder is only the first to hit the show. There are enough entertaining elements to keep readers guessing, including romance, rivalries, jealousy, and at least one evil character from Annie’s past. The prose has a charming simplicity, which keeps the attention focused on the action and the well-developed protagonist.
A quick, fun read with engaging rodeo scenes.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-60-1
Page Count: 329
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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