You'd have to be a sharper-eyed sleuth than foppish Archy McNally to find Vincent Lardo's name in tiny print on the copyright page, but Lardo, not the late Sanders, is the author of Archy's eighth adventure (McNally's Trial, 1995, etc.). So how does the newcomer, duly sanctified by the Sanders estate, measure up to his erratic master? Fans of the series will be relieved to know that Archy, whose ejection years ago from Yale Law restricted him to an investigative role in McNally and Son, Discreet Inquiries, is as well-turned-out, as quaintly good-natured, and as impenetrably innocent as ever as he goes about the task of shielding moneyed Melva Manning Williams and her eligible daughter Veronica from unwelcome publicity (while enlisting his pal Lolly Spindrift, Palm Beach's premier gossip columnist, to generate plenty of the favorable kind) after Melva admits that she shot her gold-digging husband Geoffrey Williams when she caught him in flagrante with a fleeing lovely who Lolly and Co. promptly dub the Mystery Woman. Most readers will be well ahead of Archy in seeing around the curves in this case, but Lardo does provide a few agreeable surprises courtesy of a subsidiary plot, John Fairhurst III's blackmail by a scoundrel who's threatening to tell the world that John I didn't go down with the Titanic but escaped in a dress. Despite his trademark industrial-strength blather, in fact, Archy ends up acting suspiciously intelligent as a detective. If Lardo doesn't win any new friends for the franchise, he won't disappoint old hands either.
Pub Date: July 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14490-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the...
An accident forces a man to return to his small Iowa hometown and confront violent secrets from his past, ones he’s kept hidden from his wife.
Sarah Quinlan thought she knew everything about her husband, Jack: an accident killed his parents when he was 15 so he left Penny Gate, Iowa, and has only been back once. But when the couple gets news that Jack’s beloved aunt Julia, who raised Jack and his younger sister, Amy, after their parents’ deaths, is gravely injured in a fall, the prodigal son returns. Gudenkauf (Little Mercies, 2014, etc.) makes it clear from the start that nothing should be taken at face value, not Jack’s story about his parents (his mother was actually bludgeoned to death, and his father, now MIA, was the prime suspect) or the seemingly idyllic small-town atmosphere. This, however, does little to heighten the suspense as advice columnist Sarah takes on the role of amateur detective in sniffing out Quinlan family secrets past and present. Through her we meet Jack’s terse cousin Dean and his too-perfect wife, Celia, along with Julia’s husband, Hal, who became like a father to Jack in the wake of his own family tragedy, and Amy, who couldn’t be more stereotypically “troubled.” Jack and Amy’s tragic past, which becomes the central mystery of the plot once Sarah figures out that her husband has been lying to her for two decades, is tied to Julia’s not-so-accidental fall, but only for the purposes of a neatly sewn-up plot.
Light on surprises and character development, this tepid thriller will have most astute readers correctly guessing the ending halfway through.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1865-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Fast-paced, imaginative fun. May Kurt and crew survive, as there’s a good series to continue.
The latest maritime thriller in the NUMA series starring Kurt Austin (The Rising Sea, 2018, etc.)
In 1968, the French submarine Minerve sinks without a trace in the Mediterranean. In the present day, an oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing and badly injuring many workers. Enter Kurt Austin, head of Special Projects at the National Underwater Marine Agency. Kurt leads a team that assists in marine emergencies, so they respond to the Mayday call and quickly find a stream of underwater flame—escaping gas is burning in the water, down “as far as the eye could see.” It’s a fire that needs no oxygen, a phenomenon Kurt’s team has never seen. NUMA calls the disaster clear-cut sabotage, and Kurt’s assignment is to find the guilty party. Said party is Tessa Franco, CEO of Novum Industria, who is busily sabotaging oil production around the world. She wants to promote her new fuel cell to replace “this mad reliance on fossil fuels” and become even more stinking rich than she already is. She has “infected half the world’s major oil fields” by pumping oil-eating bacteria into them, rendering them useless. “She is the oil crisis,” Kurt tells the president. Kurt's and Tessa’s teams race to locate the Minerve, which may have critical genetic research Israel commissioned half a century ago. There are great action scenes underwater and on the surface, where Tessa’s seaplane, the Monarch, is almost as big as a 747. Rotten to the core, Tessa wants her lackeys to “get rid of Austin once and for all.” Her odds look mighty good considering the firepower she brings to bear.
Fast-paced, imaginative fun. May Kurt and crew survive, as there’s a good series to continue.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1902-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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