Just a few critical degrees hotter than tepid, and the sex is offstage. Safe thrills for the easily shocked.
A horse is hijacked and held for ransom and a reporter is hired to get to the bottom of things, as the race to supplant Dick Francis continues.
Handsome, early-’30s, bachelor Ben Copperfield (Deadfall, Mar. 2005, etc.) makes enough of a living as a freelance reporter to rent a pleasant cottage with all the mod cons, keep up a big SUV and carry on a romance with lovely live-in girlfriend Lisa, a tour guide for rich Americans. Ben’s specialty as a writer is the horse world. He was practically born on a horse. Mom and Dad, now divorced, are horse people, and half-brother Mikey seems to have a future as a jockey. One of the mysteries in this not particularly challenging turf-thriller is Ben’s borderline phobic aversion to horses. It’s a neurosis that will plague him from the moment young Mikey calls to say that he’s been innocently but alarmingly involved in the kidnapping of Cajun King, favorite for upcoming premier steeplechase event, the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The missing horse is owned by exceptionally unpleasant trainer, the nouveau riche Eddie Truman, a man with an unsavory past and a disastrously dysfunctional family. Truman hires Ben to investigate the crime while keeping it out of the news, a task that must be juggled with Ben’s earlier assignment to cover the British debut of a Hungarian equine circus whose riders he has come to admire. Flirting with Truman’s younger daughter Fliss, dodging glowers from older daughter Helen, whose husband is nearly as nasty as Truman, exchanging blows with rabid animal activists, and missing assignations with Lisa, Ben finds that his two writing assignments seem to be moving towards a merger. He further finds it necessary to confront his fears and, with the help of the Hungarians, get himself back on a horse.
Just a few critical degrees hotter than tepid, and the sex is offstage. Safe thrills for the easily shocked.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-09-180027-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hutchinson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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