The dense web of characters contrasts with the spare style in this sequel to Bone Dust White (2014). Salvalaggio devotes as...
The complex case of a back-alley murder and a coverup raises the low crime rate of a remote Montana town.
When John Dalton, a decorated veteran and the son of a wealthy rancher, is shot to death next to a bar in Wilmington Creek, the captain of the state police, Ray Davidson, appoints Detective Macy Greeley as a special investigator. Davidson, the father of Macy’s young son, has yet to keep his promise about leaving his wife. Macy’s single-mother status helps her bond with John’s twin sister, Jessie, a former drug addict with a 6-year-old daughter by a man she doesn’t remember. John’s murder devastates Jessie, whose twin was her bulwark against a bullying father and a mentally unstable mother. Unfortunately, the sole witness to the murder has bad vision, and a text to Jessie’s mother that apologizes for the murder makes the case even murkier, as do a poisoned dog and John’s girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Davidson’s visits from Helena to oversee the case complicate Macy’s investigation further, especially when the town sheriff reminds her that sleeping with her boss is a bad idea yet wants to spend a night with her himself. Macy doesn’t know that receding lake waters threaten to reveal criminal evidence that John and two childhood friends wanted to stay hidden. The past catches up with the present in a death by fire and a near miss for Macy in an explosion meant to kill someone else. The disappearance of the leader of a local militia, relationships ranging from ill-advised to obsessive to deadly, and a plot that depends on key players hiding their true selves add to a Gordian knot of a plot that could have been just as good with fewer threads.
The dense web of characters contrasts with the spare style in this sequel to Bone Dust White (2014). Salvalaggio devotes as much attention to personalities as to the events that pull people together and drive them apart.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04619-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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