by Katherine Hall Page ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2013
Tuscany food markets, extra virgin olive oil and historic sites are all rendered with Page’s typical gusto and charm (The...
The Fairchilds celebrate their 25th anniversary in a Tuscany cooking school complete with wine, olives, secretive companions and homicide.
Caterer Faith Fairchild and her pastor husband, Tom, have a few days in Rome before heading for the outskirts of Florence for the inaugural week of her former assistant Francesca’s Cucina Rossi cooking program. They’re befriended by Freddy Ives, who reveals few personal details but knows the best restaurants, cafes and tourist vistas in town. To the Fairchilds’ horror, he’s stabbed to death in a Roman piazza, grasping for his pen and saying, “They’re going to ki....” The police seem uninterested, and the Fairchilds, who barely caught a glimpse of the attacker, head for the Tuscany hills, where Francesca’s cooking students are gathered. There are a bickering couple, possibly contemplating divorce; a goth girl with facial piercings; a British couple who find fault with everything; a pair of lovebirds; some Southern ladies; and Francesca’s neighbor Luke, who owns a grand palazzo and the surrounding vineyards. The group has barely warmed up the oven when Francesca’s assistant quits, decapitated snakes are left in all the bathtubs, Faith is locked in an Etruscan tomb, Tom is kidnapped, Freddy’s notebook is discovered in the palazzo, and his pen turns up too, startling one and all. It will take a call to Faith’s sister back in the States to get the British Embassy involved and separate an assassination plot from the shenanigans of a jealous local, but not to worry: The cooking school is a major success, and the participants leave with a nice set of recipes.
Tuscany food markets, extra virgin olive oil and historic sites are all rendered with Page’s typical gusto and charm (The Body in the Boudoir, 2012, etc.), but, again typically, the plot collapses since logic and reason remain missing ingredients.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-206550-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Share your opinion of this book
More by Katherine Hall Page
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.