A smart, science-based murder mystery despite a few stumbles.
Someone is using exotic poisons to kill a select group of unscrupulous medical malpractice lawyers in this debut thriller.
Robert Edgars is a private eye currently investigating lawyers. His attorney brother, Elliott, asks him to look into several members of the legal profession who sat at the same table during a recent Chicago conference on medical malpractice. They’re an immoral bunch, all involved in politics, who chase malpractice suits more for personal financial gain than their clients’ benefit. As it happens, Oliver Michaels’ seat at the table had been empty after an apparent heart attack, but readers know that someone poisoned him with rare mushrooms. When others from the group subsequently die, Elliott, who may himself be a target, requests that Robert find a link between the allegedly natural deaths. So the PI turns to NOLA Phytoceuticals, a New Orleans lab specializing in plants; Robert had initiated a deal with the lab concerning a natural aphrodisiac in Germany that turned profitable for everyone. He enlists Phytoceuticals, including pharmacist Dr. Mark Warre, and his daughter, Adelaide, in identifying poisons that might have killed the attorneys. Robert, however, has a tendency to withhold pertinent information, and it’s soon apparent others in the lab are harboring a secret or two as well. Though Vehaskari and Clark drop an early hint as to the killer’s identity and motive, there are copious suspects throughout the novel. Robert, for example, has good reason to hate lawyers, as one evidently stole all his retirement investments. The novel has some narrative inconsistencies, such as Adelaide’s twice telling her grandparents’ history to the same person. Characters are strong, however, and sometimes engaged in conversations or subplots not directly tied to the murders. The best of that indirectly related material involves Robert’s scheme for the German aphrodisiac, which entails smuggling and what seems to be a green-card marriage. The authors’ intelligent writing abounds with details, especially about plants. This leads to many scenes consisting primarily of dialogue, which are never tedious even as Mark, Adelaide, and others debate deaths readers already know are homicides.
A smart, science-based murder mystery despite a few stumbles.Pub Date: July 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-7734-0
Page Count: 258
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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