As the curtain rises, Lee Montara and her sister Rosie Cooper are trading stories about their childhood as they wait, armed with a pistol, in Rosie's Taconic Hills farmhouse for the man who's been terrorizing them. A series of long flashbacks shows Lee, a photo editor for City, switching her vacation destination from Cozumel to Taconic Hills to avoid megalomaniac photographer Stewart McClaren; the arrival of a series of sinister gifts—a bouquet of rotting yarrow leaves, a layer cake, six candles, a bunch of blood-filled balloons- -each tied with black satin ribbon; and the discovery that even though he's followed her to Taconic Hills, McClaren can't be the sender of these unwelcome presents, because he's been strangled.... Far less inspired than So Shall You Reap (1992), Wallace's last outing in Taconic Hills, though it presents an ingenious motive for mischief that may well be unique in the annals of crime fiction.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-46907-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and...
Four women with hidden secrets form a group to combat deceit and solve murders.
The ladies of Miracle Springs work in mysterious ways. Former librarian Nora Pennington, owner of Miracle Books, helps people deal with their troubles by recommending specific reading material. Hester Winthrop, owner and baker at the Gingerbread House, creates scones individually tailored to different people’s needs. Estella Sadler, owner of Magnolia Salon and Spa, is a high-maintenance gal with a bad reputation with men. Quiet June Dixon works at the Miracle Springs thermal pools. All are haunted by terrible events that continue to cast long shadows. The ladies’ passing acquaintance with one another deepens when Neil Parrish, a man who’d chatted with Nora and bought a scone from Hester, falls or is pushed in front of a train. After Sheriff Todd calls them in for interviews because they’d all spoken with the dead man, they confide in each other their suspicions that Parrish was murdered despite the sheriff’s ready assumption that his death was suicide. Parrish was one of the partners in Pine Ridge Properties, a new housing development going up near Mineral Springs, and June, who talked to him at the pools, said he seemed to have regrets about the project. Incensed by the way the misogynist sheriff treats them, the ladies form a secret society to investigate. When Nora expresses interest in buying a house in Pine Ridge, she’s surprised to learn that she qualifies for a loan from the local bank run by the sheriff’s brother. As the ladies investigate, another partner in the suspicious building project is killed, and Estella is arrested for his murder. Now the friends are even more determined to discover the truth.
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and both the cunning present-day mystery and the slowly revealed secrets of the intriguing heroines’ pasts.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1237-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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