Gratuitous complications weigh down the charms of this jinxed investigation, which don’t ring as true as the setups of...
A socialite-turned–private eye makes waves in an investigation of a hunting trophy that turns into a murder case.
Though the Discreet Retrieval Agency is hardly a profitable pursuit, widow Lola Woodby is determined to continue solving mysteries (Teetotaled, 2016, etc.) with her former cook, Berta, a formidable Swede. Their latest client is wealthy Lord Eustace Sudley, who wants them to retrieve a stuffed and mounted rhinoceros head from his friend and hunting companion Rudy Montgomery, saying it actually belongs to him. Berta is eager for the agency to take the case, if only to keep them in chocolate cake. Lola has her eyes on a bigger prize: she’s sure that her boyfriend, Ralph Oliver, is about to give her a ring. But Lola may not be the detective she believes she is, for when she meets Ralph at dinner, he presents her a gift box containing a gun, indicating that he’d rather she be safe in her single state than become his wife. Thrown by Ralph’s lack of commitment, Lola decides to take the job with Lord Sudley, and she and Berta head to Connecticut’s Montgomery Hall to hunt the rhinoceros trophy in its newest habitat. Forced to hobnob with weekend guests, Lola feels right at home with her wealthy employer and friends, unlike Berta, who just wants to get the job done. The stakes rise dramatically when Rudy is shot and killed and Lord Sudley hires the agency for a proper murder investigation. Berta doesn’t trust Lord Sudley’s intentions, but Lola thinks the investigation might offer a way to get over Ralph, and the possibility that Lord Sudley wants to keep her around for romantic reasons is the perfect olive in her martini.
Gratuitous complications weigh down the charms of this jinxed investigation, which don’t ring as true as the setups of Chance’s modern-day series (Bad Housekeeping, 2017, etc.).Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10905-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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