The broad style leaves little room for nuance, though it’s not always clear whether that’s a choice on the part of the...
Murder and misgivings surround a small-town bookseller who teams up with her sister to prove that she’s not a jinx.
As he’s sentenced for murder, Bob Kelly turns to star witness Tricia Miles and declares her a jinx, simultaneously cursing her and blaming her for his crime. The name-calling may be cruel, but Bob’s far from the first person to notice Tricia’s tropism to homicide (A Just Clause, 2017, etc.). Maybe that’s why one plank in the platform for her Chamber of Commerce presidential candidacy is making Stoneham a safer place, along with winning the title of Prettiest Village in New Hampshire. Tricia should be a shoo-in for the presidential role. The incumbent is her sister, Angelica, who’s been trying to coach Tricia into success at their daily lunches at Angelica’s restaurant, Booked for Lunch, and dinners at each other’s homes. But Tricia has some trouble on the campaign trail that’s exacerbated when a cocktail party at her bookstore, Haven’t Got A Clue, ends with the death of Angelica’s former colleague Frannie Armstrong’s date. Chief of Police Grant Baker, Tricia’s ex, rolls his eyes at the news of Tricia’s proximity to another murder; a similar lightness attends others who don’t make it through the story without having “bought the farm.” Russ Smith, another ex, complicates her life by throwing his own hat into the presidential ring. Though he’s moved on from Tricia, he harbors hope for their future and shows it through bullying, threats, and intimidation. Worse still, Marshall Cambridge, the proprietor of the local porn bookshop, has turned his attentions to Tricia. As she tries to focus on her campaign and the dramatic news that Angelica is being blackmailed, it becomes clear that someone’s trying to vandalize her store and maybe even hurt her.
The broad style leaves little room for nuance, though it’s not always clear whether that’s a choice on the part of the author or a heroine she seems to hold in high regard for reasons that remain mysterious.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-48983-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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