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
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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