The mystery, though surprising enough, is outshone by family problems, detailed descriptions of the setting, and devilishly...
A coffin as a birthday gift is either a bizarre joke or a very bad omen.
Every aspect of Faith Fairchild’s life in lovely Aleford, Massachusetts, is about to cause her trouble. Her college-bound son Ben’s girlfriend, who tells him she needs some space, has unfriended him on Facebook. Her best friend Pix’s daughter has lost her job and her boyfriend and moved home. Pix’s widowed mother is dating a man whose motives are suspect. The town council, whose members include Faith’s minister husband, is divided over a proposal to put in a strip mall. But these problems fade away when Faith receives a call from Max Dane, once a famous Broadway producer, offering her an outrageous amount to cater a weekendlong birthday party for a dozen people at his nearby estate. Arriving at Max’s mansion to discuss the arrangements, she meets his attractive jack-of-all-trades, Ian Morrison, who will help her cater to the guests. Although Max does indeed want to throw a birthday party, he’s actually hiring Faith for her talents as an amateur sleuth (The Body in the Wardrobe, 2016, etc.) because he’s sure one of his guests has sent him a coffin containing a Playbill from his 20-year-old production of Heaven or Hell: The Musical. The play was a flop that wrecked the careers of many associated with it, and all his invited guests had a part in the disaster. After giving Faith a tour of the magnificent house, Max reveals that it was the home of his mother’s wealthy family, who cast her off when she married beneath her. They continued to invite the younger Max to stay every year, but his visits had proved so awful they were practically abusive. Although two of his guests die before the party, the rest arrive on time. Can Faith figure out which of them harbors thoughts of murder before the deed is done?
The mystery, though surprising enough, is outshone by family problems, detailed descriptions of the setting, and devilishly delicious food.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243956-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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