Wall’s tense mysteries and Bay’s complicated love life will doubtless keep her fans coming back for more.
The South Carolina lowlands are a little lower than usual in p.i. Bay Tanner’s newest case.
Ever since a hurricane hit the Palmetto State, Bay Tanner has been busy overseeing the restoration of her Hilton Head dwelling along with her family home that houses her half sister Julia (Canaan's Gate, 2010, etc.), her caregiver Elizabeth Shelly and Bay's beloved housekeeper Lavinia. When Bay is approached by Winston Wolfe, a wealthy and successful true-crime writer, she and her partner Erik, along with Bay’s husband Red, a former police officer, are initially happy to take up the unusual case at a pay rate far above their usual charges. Wolfe claims to need research for the book he’s writing on the unsolved disappearance of Morgan Tyler Bell. The wealthy recluse’s assistant Terry Gerard went missing at the same time, leaving only the dead body of the housekeeper to be found at his Jericho Cay retreat. According to Wolfe, Bell’s distant cousin wants to have him declared legally dead. Wolfe produces a copy of a driver’s license in the name of Gerard but claims the pictured man is Bell. Small wonder that Bay, Red and Erik become more uneasy as their investigation continues. Their client goes missing; Bay is threatened by Gerard; and Bell’s island home is torched. Bay has problems of her own when her mentally challenged half sister’s caregiver dies in a fall, but she is too involved to give up on Wolfe’s convoluted and ever more dangerous case.
Wall’s tense mysteries and Bay’s complicated love life will doubtless keep her fans coming back for more.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60185-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Utter non-scents.
Die-hard Yankee candle maker Stella Wright (Murder’s No Votive Confidence, 2018) gets caught up in a trans-Atlantic murder plot.
Stella thoroughly enjoys her trip to Paris even though her mother, perfume expert Millie Wright, who’s scheduled to speak on a panel entitled “The Art of Scent Extractions” at the World Perfumery Conference, gets preempted by a murder. Sadly, once they’re back home in Nantucket, things get even weirder. Stella receives an anonymous note threatening her mom if Stella doesn’t turn over a secret formula hidden in Millie’s bag. Her mom can’t help because she’s in the hospital courtesy of an overenthusiastic attempt by Stella’s cat, Tinker, to befriend her. While trespassing on a suspicious sailboat, Stella meets U.S. Agent Sarah Hill, who warns her that well-known anarchist Rex Laruam plans to disrupt the upcoming Peace Jubilee using a stolen formula he secreted in Millie’s bag after he stabbed the agent guarding it back in Paris. Ignoring the advice of her friend Andy Southerland, a Nantucket cop, to leave detection to the professionals, Stella tries to unmask the elusive Laruam. As she spies on a bevy of unlikely suspects, the plot spirals further and further out of control: There’s a Canadian couple staying at an Airbnb run by Stella’s cousin Chris who whisper sweet but suspicious nothings in the dark, a shovel-wielding schoolmarm, a gang of old geezers who have a collective crush on Millie, a surprise 30th-birthday party planned by Stella’s beau, Peter Bailey, and an even more surprising impromptu airplane ride.
Utter non-scents.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2141-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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