The partners dance around their powerful feelings in a stunning Irish landscape, making this far more than an ordinary...
Two Buffalo detectives have yet another brush with death.
Lauren Riley and her partner and housemate, Shane Reese, have an intense and complex relationship on the cusp of being sexual. They are such stars at solving cold case murders that they’ve earned the enmity of Buffalo Police Department higher-ups annoyed with their fame. Forced to have her annual physical, Riley is bummed when she’s put on medical leave after refusing to admit she hasn't fully recovered from having been stabbed in another high-profile case. Bored, she renews her private investigator’s license and waits for an interesting case, which promptly appears when Sharon Whitney hires her to go to Ireland to find a Picasso that was stolen 40 years ago, while she was still married to Howard Whitney. Although the couple divorced and split the insurance payment of $3 million, the painting is now worth $20 million, and they both want it badly. Nothing was proven against the lead suspect, handyman Jimmy Breen, and he returned to Ireland. Riley convinces Reese to join her for a working holiday, and they arrive at a B&B in Keelnamara to learn that the Garda have ruled Breen’s recent death a murder and his tiny house has been trashed. When someone scours their room at the B&B, they realize that the painting has yet to be found. Since everyone in the small community knows about the missing painting, even the local Garda is suspect. The stakes are raised when a pub owner is tortured and killed. Riley and Reese keep a step ahead of the Garda and solve the complicated case, but their relationship and Riley’s prospects are still far from certain.
The partners dance around their powerful feelings in a stunning Irish landscape, making this far more than an ordinary procedural.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9131-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.
A bear is hunting prey in Wyoming’s Bighorns. And not just any bear.
It’s bad enough that Clay Hutmacher, who manages the Double Diamond Ranch, has lost his son, Clay Jr., to a vicious attack by a grizzly bear. What’s much worse is that Clay Jr.—who’d been about to pop the question to game warden Joe Pickett’s daughter, Sheridan—is only the first of the victims over an exceptionally broad geographical area. Marshal Marvin Bertignolli is clawed and bitten to death over in Hanna. Sgt. Ryan Winner is found bleeding out north of Rawlins. Former Twelve Sleep County prosecutor Dulcie Schalk, one of two survivors of an ambush, doesn’t survive her final encounter. The four experts chosen to kill the grizzly rope Joe into their expedition, but since their quarry keeps turning up far from the last sighting, the most meaningful confrontation the Predator Attack Team has is with a pair of Mama Bears, animal rights activists who demand due process for Tisiphone, as they’ve dubbed the presumed killer. Box, who’s far too canny to leave Tisiphone alone on center stage, follows Joe’s old antagonist Dallas Cates as the ex–rodeo star is released from prison and embarks on his revenge tour, which takes him to Lee Ogburn-Russell, an inventor whose life Dallas saved, and Axel Soledad, a correspondent who shares so many enemies with Dallas that he suggests they go after them together. Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer.
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593331347
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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