Van Wormer plots with consummate skill, but her talky style lacks flavor, her knowing asides lack wit. Still: a carefully...
Bookbiz babe and sometime sleuth Sally Harrington (Expose, 1999, etc.) returns, with a cool new gig at a TV news program in Connecticut—and a hot new love.
Networking for all he’s worth, Spencer Hawes, an executive editor at Bennet, Fitzallen & Coe, Sally's former employer in New York, escorts her to a swanky Hollywood party to celebrate a studio head’s ghostwritten memoir. There, she meets Lilliana Martin, an enigmatic blond beauty on the verge of stardom, and proposes an interview. The bisexual Lilliana counters with a proposition of her own: a threesome. Sally angrily refuses, accusing the protesting Spencer of setting her up, and storms off back to New York. After a passionate night of kiss-and-make-up sex with Spencer, he disappears . . . and Sally is appalled to find out that copies of a videotape featuring steamy highlights of their tryst have been sent to everyone she knows. Who taped her? Why? And where is Spencer? Sally suspects that Lilliana may know, especially when the actress’s boyfriend comes looking for her—and is then found dead, shot mob-style twice in the head. Tracking down Lilliana, she uncovers a war between mob factions over a lucrative West Coast protection racket for movie-union biggies. Looks like the people she most wants to talk to have vanished into the federal witness-protection program under new identities. And who could be better at assuming a new identity than an actress? Spencer explains all when he finally resurfaces, after being beaten to a pulp and sent out to sea on a garbage barge. Sadder but wiser, Sally forgives him—and does her best to forget him.
Van Wormer plots with consummate skill, but her talky style lacks flavor, her knowing asides lack wit. Still: a carefully crafted mystery with a likable heroine worth a place in the increasingly crowded Connecticut suburbs.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55166-590-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
A crime novel from longtime former Newark Star-Ledger sportswriter Klein (the paperback Blindside) that’s, at best, a split decision. Big scrappy New York football-star-to-be Ed Buck, signed to the Chicago Bears, gets permanently sidelined when his knee is ruined in a game against the Green Bay Packers. He turns to sportswriting for New York dailies but maintains a close friendship with Bears star quarterback Adam Benson. Years later, on the eve of a game against the Giants, Benson knocks back a few vodkas and tells Buck that he’s been losing games because he and his sexpot wife Sherri have been receiving death threats from a mysterious mobster. After Buck promises to keep the news to himself, Benson vows to beat the Giants the next day. And so he does, playing so cleverly that even Giants fans cheer, until he’s tackled in a pile-up and leaves the field on a stretcher. After the Bears win, the team’s doctor announces that Benson has died of a heart attack. Buck, of course, is skeptical. He takes a leave from his job and gets fiancÇe Leigh and NYPD Lieutenant Joe Keegan to help him investigate. Before the trio can start to gather clues, Klein introduces the fat, sneering sports-fixer Billy DeSalvo and his mobster henchman Rico Scalzi. Not only did DeSalvo order Benson’s death, he was Sherri’s de facto pimp before he manipulated her into marrying the ballplayer. Sherri, a cocaine addict, dreams of being a movie star but decides to confess her many, many sins to Buck and company after learning that Keegan wants an autopsy on her late husband. Sherri’s betrayal angers mob underboss Anthony Assante and boss of bosses Arthur McDonald, an 86-year-old Italian pretending to be Irish, who start a blackmail and killing spree to cover their tracks. Some embarrassingly trite Godfather-ly fumbles but enough insider stuff about the shadier side of pro football to score even so.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86370-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
As historians and contractors slug it out over replacing the ancient waterlines in Mesa Verde National Park, noncombatant park ranger Anna Pigeon battles a demon of her own: her growing attraction to Stacy Meyers, a law-enforcement temp unhappily married (what did he and Rose Meyers ever see in each other, anyway?) and burdened with a special-needs stepchild. Soon enough, though, there are more immediate problems: contractor Ted Greeley's hiring of Tom Silva, estranged husband of park superintendent's secretary Patsy Silva, who immediately feels she's being harassed by her obsessive ex; a midnight sabotage attempt on Greeley's excavation equipment; a nip-and-tuck airlift of an asthmatic girl who collapses in the Cliff Palace; Stacy's strangely dissociated behavior during the rescue; and finally the eerie discovery of Stacy's corpse, neatly laid out on the fire-pit floor of the Cliff Palace without a mark to indicate how he died. Whodunit, and why, and how? Not as intense or as ingenious as A Superior Death (1994), and this time Anna's struggles with alcoholism and the continuing grief of widowhood eclipse the more routine intrigues of the plot. But the supporting characters have stubborn lives of their own — you never get the sense that they've spent their whole lives waiting to be suspects in a murder case — and Barr's sense of place is as wondrous as ever.
Pub Date: April 6, 1995
ISBN: 0425197255
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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