A brisk tempo, a sympathetic hero and a plot as complicated as the beloved opéra bouffe it parallels will make Lebow’s debut...
A librettist-turned–reluctant detective sees the characters of his latest opera come to life and just as quickly die.
Although Lorenzo Da Ponte enjoys the goodwill of the Emperor Joseph II and has earned some fame in Vienna as the Court Theater poet, he lives in exile from his beloved Venice. Scraping by on commissions and counting every florin, he longs for enough success in his collaboration with Wolfgang Mozart on The Marriage of Figaro to be able to buy a decent dress suit. When his barber, Johann Vogel, asks for his help, the kindly poet agrees to visit the palais of Baron Gabler, Vogel’s former employer, to find out something about Vogel’s birth mother. Vogel is convinced that she was a noblewoman and that somehow the family connection will help him pay off his debt to Gabler’s coldhearted housekeeper so that he can be released from prison and marry Baroness Gabler’s pretty young maid. The situation becomes more complicated when the baron’s impudent page, Florian Auerstein, is pushed out a window and killed. Florian, the only son of a prince, was being groomed for an important diplomatic mission with the baron, and Emperor Joseph’s minister of police forces Da Ponte to pose as Baroness Gabler’s poetry instructor—on pain of being tried for Florian’s murder himself—to ferret out a spy within the household. At the same time Da Ponte is trying to finish the Figaro libretto, link a medallion to the mystery of Vogel’s birth, and make sense of a cryptic notebook of Florian’s, he falls in love with the lovely, unhappy wife of the womanizing baron. As secrets come to light, including one or two of Da Ponte’s, the librettist finds himself no closer to an answer but very much a target for a killer.
A brisk tempo, a sympathetic hero and a plot as complicated as the beloved opéra bouffe it parallels will make Lebow’s debut resonate with opera lovers and lay readers alike.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05351-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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