A meticulously arranged mystery in which technology and classic literature collide.
This second installment of a series finds a New England prep school rocked by heroin overdoses.
The Moonus Dawkins School is an elite prep school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Within 10 days, however, two senior students have died of drug overdoses: Mitchel Young, a popular academic ace, and Ron Eastwood, a talented musician and loner. Enter Drug Enforcement Administration agent Jason Kraft, who’s been covertly inserted into Dawkins as a teacher. His class is “Social Media in the Digital Age,” and both deceased students had been attending before his arrival. Helping Kraft is Alondra Espinoza, a vacationing FBI agent—and his fiancee. The probe immediately adopts a surreal flavor when Molly Stark, from the DEA’s media unit, subjects Kraft to an interview aimed at dissecting his current case for the purpose of training new recruits. She insists on knowing the vital details of the inquiry and Kraft’s methodology, which doesn’t sit well with him. Kraft also teams up with David Ellinghood, a local detective, and befriends professor Jim Soulmer. The investigation soon reveals that Mitchel, a dedicated pilot-in-training, would not be able to get his flier’s license, and he and his girlfriend, Hillary Barrymore, had been going through a rough patch. Then, an interview with Mitchel’s roommate, BJ McGee, suggests that the teen may have been murdered. In this literary thriller, Bombard (TobaccoNet, 2015) delivers an ode to the immortal Sherlock Holmes and the 1891 Arthur Conan Doyle short story “The Red-Headed League.” The Mind and Bones secret society, a system of underground tunnels, and the rumors of flight school hazing add touches of New England noir to picturesque Stockbridge. The author also does a superb job of rotating his multifaceted characters in and out of suspicion (the eloquent Soulmer, for example, convinces a drug dealer that he needs “some pure heaven man”). As Kraft delves further into the complex case, he’s reminded that “we were often struggling with competing good and bad influences in life.” Best of all: more suspicious deaths throughout the narrative keep the tension ratcheted high.
A meticulously arranged mystery in which technology and classic literature collide.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5393-2264-1
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
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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