As usual with the firm of Rosato & DiNunzio (Corrupted, 2015, etc.), the complications aren’t worked out nearly as...
Mary DiNunzio, the second-best attorney in Philadelphia, is about to walk down the aisle when she gets sucked into the very real possibility of becoming a mother, or at least a foster mother, first.
Retired accountant Edward O’Brien wants Mary’s help in defending Patrick, the dyslexic 10-year-old grandson he’s raising, from Steven Robertson, the teacher’s aide at Grayson Elementary whose lawsuit alleges that Patrick attacked him with a pair of scissors. It’s all nonsense, Edward insists: Patrick, though chronically humiliated by his primitive reading skills, his habit of throwing up when he’s stressed out, and the constant bullying he attracts, wouldn’t harm a fly. Besides, Robertson’s suit is merely designed to deflect attention from the fact that the last time he caught Patrick throwing up, he punched the child hard enough to bruise his face. In fact, as Mary’s swift and efficient investigation discloses, the situation is much worse than that; Robertson’s abused Patrick sexually on at least three occasions. But Patrick keeps going disastrously off script, and Robertson’s lawyer, Nick Machiavelli, justifying his claim to direct descent from the father of Renaissance realpolitik, ties Mary up in legal knots when Edward unexpectedly dies and she files an emergency appeal to become Patrick’s temporary guardian. Even worse, there’s evidence that Edward’s death may have been murder, with Patrick the obvious suspect and Mary his obvious accomplice. Starting slowly, Scottoline expertly stokes the boiler to the bursting point, and readers will stay up long past their bedtimes watching Mary try to sweet-talk everyone from the family court judge to Anthony Rotunno, her fiance, who returns from a trip to California to a bombshell that forces him to reimagine his life with Mary in radically new terms.
As usual with the firm of Rosato & DiNunzio (Corrupted, 2015, etc.), the complications aren’t worked out nearly as carefully as they’re piled up, and fans who race nonstop through the last hundred pages will be doing both themselves and Scottoline a favor.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09962-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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