Fans of all things Sherlock-ian will delight in Joanna, so like her father and already training her schoolboy son, Johnny,...
Joanna Watson, the daughter of Sherlock Holmes, continues to pursue the espionage investigations that have recently become her specialty (A Study in Treason, 2018, etc.).
November 1915. Dr. Alexander Verner suddenly appears at 221B Baker St. with a story for the Watson family about how he was taken in a carriage with blacked-out windows to visit a patient whose identity he was not told but who managed to communicate that he was being held captive. After Dr. Verner leaves, Joanna ponders the problem together with her husband, John Jr., and her father-in-law, Holmes amanuensis Dr. John H. Watson, concluding that the unknown man is being held by German agents who may also target Dr. Verner. They arrive at Verner’s door only to find Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard investigating the man's disappearance. Lt. Dunn of Naval Intelligence, called to join the party, reluctantly identifies the mysterious patient as Alistair Ainsworth, a citizen who’s highly prized by German spies. Because Verner’s spilled chloroform on the floor, Toby Two, a hound with an amazingly sensitive nose, can track the odor to a deserted house where they find the body of Dr. Verner, tortured and strangled, but no sign of Ainsworth. Dunn finally acknowledges that the abduction of Ainsworth, one of four people in a top-secret cryptanalysis unit charged with making the British naval codes fail-safe, could spell disaster. Ainsworth’s fellow workers, all brilliant and unorthodox in their methods, are both suspects and sources of help in recovering him before the Germans can break him and get the sensitive information they seek. Using her father’s methods, Joanna leads the search for Ainsworth, who, despite being moved from place to place in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, keeps hiding clues in plain sight for Joanna and her crew to follow.
Fans of all things Sherlock-ian will delight in Joanna, so like her father and already training her schoolboy son, Johnny, in the methods that have solved so many cases like this exceptionally tricky one.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-10108-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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