A star athlete whose life has fallen apart finds that there’s still no place like home.
Chase Ford, the star of his high school basketball team, won a free ride to college and played for the Lakers before an accident ruined his knee and his career and his dependence on pain pills ruined his marriage to a famous singer. Now he’s paying a short visit to his hometown before he decides whether to accept the offer of an announcer’s job. Despite his success with basketball and women, he can’t shake his unhappy childhood. His mother was paralyzed in an accident, and his coldhearted father’s liaison with the woman he hired to care for the house produced a child Chase has never met. His return coincides with the murders of Jimmie Riley, the star of the Brandon Buffalos basketball team, and of Chase’s old coach. His high school nemesis, Sheriff Lincoln Kendall, is all too eager to tie Chase to those deaths. Chase, who’s secretly been helping those in need by paying their tax bills and other debts, plans to arrange a college account for Dolly Benavidez, his half sister. He still has special friends from high school: Marty, now a sheriff’s deputy; Birdie Hawkins, the game warden who always loved him; and Mercy Saylor, the high school beauty who played Chase and Kendall off against each other. Birdie, who generally has little time for the sheriff, points out a clue from the Riley crime scene: the print of a woman’s size Tony Lama boot, not exactly rare in Colorado farm and ranch country. Chase must sort through numerous suspects and layers of hidden undercurrents if he’s ever to resolve the conflicts in his life.
A humdinger of a first novel that brings together several gripping storylines, an appealingly flawed hero, and an intimate sense of life in small-town America.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10316-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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A serial killer with a sense of history is the baddie in this latest from Baldacci, one of the reigning kings of potboilers (Split Second, 2003, etc.).
He kills, he leaves clues, he flatters through imitation: Son of Sam, the San Francisco Zodiac killer, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gracy, and so on down a sanguinary list of accredited members of the Monsters’ Hall of Fame. Suddenly, the landscape of poor little Wrightsburg, Virginia, is littered with corpses, and ex-Secret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have their hands full. That’s because bewildered, beleaguered Chief of Police Todd Williams has turned to the newly minted private investigating firm of King and Maxwell for desperately needed (unofficial) help. Even these ratiocinative wizards, however, admit to puzzlement. “But I'm not getting this,” says Michelle. “Why commit murders in similar styles to past killers as a copycat would and then write letters making it clear you’re not them?” Excellent question, and it goes pretty much unanswered. Never mind—enter the battling Battles, a family with the requisite number of sins and secrets to qualify fully as hot southern Gothic and to prop up a plot in need. Bobby Battles, the patriarch, is bedridden, but Remmy, his wife, is one lively mischief-making steel magnolia. She’s brought breaking-and-entering charges against decent local handyman Junior Deaver, who as a result languishes in the county jail. Convinced of his innocence, Junior’s lawyer hires King & Maxwell to sniff around for exculpatory evidence. Well, will the two plot streams flow together? You betcha. Will the copycat-serial-killer at one point decide that King and Maxwell are just too clever to live? Inevitably. And when at last that CCSK’s identity is revealed and his crimes explained (talkily and tediously), will readers be satisfied? Only the charitable among them.
Lame but, like its predecessors, bound for bestsellerdom.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53108-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
Categories: THRILLER
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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