Though the locals complain that murder victims seem to pile up in Dr. Elliott’s wake, that’s no more than a convention of...
Dr. Lance Elliot (Dying to Know, 2010) returns to deal with the ever-widening contagion of homicide that bids fair to decimate Croydon.
Nobody at Bensham Manor School thinks it greatly amiss when PE teacher Marlene Jeffries is bashed to death with a dumbbell. After all, it’s widely assumed that Thornton Heath physician Lance Elliot—whose father’s inamorata, Ada Clarke, is the head dinner lady at the school—attracts corpses wherever he goes. Inspector Masson duly arrests caretaker George Cotterill, whose dicky heart gives out while he’s in custody. Case closed—until Yvette Mangon, a math teacher at Bensham Manor, is stabbed to death with a compass. Yvette, it turns out, was much more than just Marlene’s landlady, and their unorthodox domestic arrangements may well have inflamed murderous passions. But then why would someone go on to drown biology teacher Jeremy Gillman and leave him with a frog in his mouth? The link between each dead teacher and the symbol of his or her subject matter seems promising. But when McCarthy, whose métier is grisly forensics (Soul Seeker, 2011, etc.), adds an accidental death, a suicide, a threatening ex-brother-in-law and whoever killed the pet rabbit of veterinarian Maxine Christy, Dr. Elliot’s girlfriend, you have to wonder if he’s asking you to accept a little too much of the cozy gardens of Bensham.
Though the locals complain that murder victims seem to pile up in Dr. Elliott’s wake, that’s no more than a convention of the genre. The real problem here is the number of independent malefactors working at cross-purposes to keep the population down.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8119-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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