A fitfully effective but readable start to a mystery series.
A serial killer targets girls as a woman searches relentlessly for her long-lost daughter in this novel.
Miranda Steele is as tough as her name. She can hold her own in a hot pepper–eating contest, swear like a stevedore, and dispatch bar creeps with some well-placed, high-heeled stomps and kicks. In short, as someone observes, “Girl’s a real scrapper.” But it was not always thus. Thirteen years earlier, she was the verbally and physically abused wife of a policeman who one night literally threw her out into the snow, but not before giving up their infant daughter for adoption. #MeToo? She’s more like #NoMore. Since then, she has toughened up, moved from city to city searching for her daughter, and supported herself by welding girders on a New York skyscraper, harvesting crab on a Maine fishing boat, and performing various jobs on a Texas oil rig. Now working construction in Pittsburgh, she is contacted by a volunteer with an adoption reunion agency who has a solid lead on her daughter’s whereabouts. She heads to Atlanta’s tony Buckhead community, where she meets wealthy and handsome Wade Parker, “Atlanta’s ace detective” and “the town’s most eligible 44-year-old bachelor.” Initial distrust transforms into a partnership as they investigate the murder of a local 13-year-old girl with whom Parker has a family connection. Miranda worries that the victim could be her daughter. This series launch is an appealing mashup of gritty serial killer thriller and romance novel (“ ‘Don’t tempt me, Miranda.’ She gazed into those knowing, deep gray eyes. ‘Why not?’ she murmured. ‘You’ve been tempting me since the first night I saw you’ ”). Lanier (Mind Bender, 2017, etc.) has created an empowered and formidable heroine. But her writing is as subtle as one of those hot peppers Miranda crunches. “I made myself strong,” Miranda defiantly tells Parker at one point. “I vowed to myself that no one would ever hurt me like that again. Never….Do you hear me? Never.” In comedy, there is a rule of three. There should be a rule of two for crime fiction. “A woman can never make herself too tough or too strong” gets the job done. Adding “or too street smart” is overkill.
A fitfully effective but readable start to a mystery series.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-941191-12-5
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Felicity Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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