A wildly overstuffed suspenser that pits A.D.A. Susan Given (Given the Crime, 1998) against every lowlife in Manhattan, and a couple of late arrivals from offshore. Susan, who runs the Asset Forfeiture Unit, is overworked, overstressed, and suffering from nightmares. She’s getting no support in her quest for judgments against numbers racketeer Eduardo San Juan or Ugandan charity scammer Davis Kumba, and now that her boss William Archibald has turned on his old mentor Dwight Pelham, whose American Patriot Bank doesn’t have an honest dollar on deposit, things are about to get hotter. Meantime, a serial killer Susan’s nicknamed Rice Krispies (a sobriquet that instantly and implausibly gets leaked to the press, along with every other detail of the slayings) is murdering joggers in Central Park; on the home front, Susan’s ex, psychiatrist Hugh Carver, is mounting a full-court press for custody of their two adopted daughters. Desperate for relief, Susan jets to the Caribbean paradise of St. Stephen’s just in time to get involved with a charming drug mule who’s killed by his boss hours before Susan’s due to leave St. Stephen’s—giving her just enough time to sprain her ankle fleeing the killer and to endure a rum-soaked debriefing by the insinuating island police chief. Back in New York, Hugh Carver and Susan’s southern-belle niece Brandy Prescott both get embroiled in a power struggle over at Channel 8 News, and Susan finds herself running into (1) a mobbed-up former Playmate of the Year; (2) the murdered mule’s runaway sister; (3) the charming St. Stephen’s policeman; and (4) the vengeful druglord himself. And don’t forget the Central Park killer, though the hard-working authors almost do. The wonder isn’t that Susan has nightmares, but that she can bring herself to take in the mail every day. Anybody interested in a new Manhattan soap opera will find enough overgalvanized minor characters and felonious subplots for an entire season of Lawyer on the Edge, with enough loose ends for a second season’s worth of teasers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-00153-1
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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