A trimmer plotline might help Mugavero’s future entries, but in this one, the tail definitely wags the dog.
A baker of doggie treats turns detective.
Stan Connor (Murder Most Finicky, 2015, etc.) loves her new life in Frog Ledge, Connecticut, where she and boyfriend Jake McGee preside over a menagerie of pets and she prepares for the grand opening of Pawsitively Organic Pet Patisserie and Café. But when nasty Eleanor Chang, Stan’s nemesis at Warner, the high-powered consulting firm she left, turns up dead at an engagement party, it throws a jolt into Stan’s newfound bucolic bliss. Even worse, Stan’s ex Richard Ruse is arrested for the murder in what seems like an obvious coverup. Despite their messy breakup, Stan wants to clear Richard, but not before she enlists local yoga teacher Francie Tucker and Jake’s sister, Brenna, to help her bake approximately one gazillion Vegetable Beef Crackers and Parmesan Cheese Bones for her canine clients, shelters her sister, Caitlyn, from a too-avid suitor, and raises funds for a bulletproof vest for Trooper Garrett Colby’s police dog. All these comings and goings stretch the arc of this tale so mercilessly that the eventual investigation seems almost like a sequel added to the tail end of an endless paean to the joys of small-town friendship.
A trimmer plotline might help Mugavero’s future entries, but in this one, the tail definitely wags the dog.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0019-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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