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LITTLE MISS EVIL

No real detective work to speak of; like Dorothy, Nick finds in the end that the answer to all his problems was under his...

Raphael’s fourth continues his oh-so-bitchy and totally, totally true peek at the petty little lives of the petty little professors in a non-grant producing department at the fictional State University of Michigan (SUM). Already snubbed by higher-ups, including dimwitted President Littleterry and loathsome Dean Bullerschmidt, the faculty of the English and Rhetoric (EAR) department find themselves further beset by the appointment of cruel and imperious Camille Cypriani, best-selling novelist, to a newly-created chaired professorship. Cypriani’s conquest of the department library, which she converts into an office befitting her august station, doesn’t really bother lowly nontenured Nick Hoffman (The Death of a Constant Lover, 1999, etc.)—even though his occasional sleuthing has got him exiled to the basement along with Byron Summerscale, former chair of Western Civilization, which was unceremoniously merged with EAR by a cost-conscious administration. But her supplanting Nick’s lover, Stefan, as SUM’s leading literary light makes him seethe. As does a series of anonymous threats—death wishes under his windshield wiper, a scorched volume of Dante in his mailbox, and a torched copy of his Wharton bibliography in his wastebasket. Still, his colleagues are too busy stabbing each other in the back to offer Nick much help, or to mount a serious protest against Cypriani’s unorthodox hiring, until disaster strikes right under their noses.

No real detective work to speak of; like Dorothy, Nick finds in the end that the answer to all his problems was under his nose all along. But this trip to Oz is a joy throughout, thanks mostly to heroes with brains, heart, and nerve to spare.

Pub Date: May 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8027-3342-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Walker

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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REMEMBER WHEN

A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...

Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.

Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.

A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-399-15106-0

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003

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