Soule takes a break from her P.J. Benson series (Eat Crow and Die, 2015, etc.) for a hair-raising thriller that breaks no...
An Alaska cop whose past is shrouded in secrecy must deal with a crime that revives all her horrifying memories.
Officer Katherine Ward of the Skagway Police Department lives with her grandfather, whose Alzheimer's is progressing swiftly. Only the police chief, who’s on medical leave, knows that Katherine was once kidnapped, raped, and tortured by The Beekeeper, a sociopath who murdered her entire family. No one in the small department is much excited by Crystal Morgan’s claim that Misty, her 16-year-old stepdaughter, has been kidnapped. The two were supposedly bonding on a cruise while Crystal’s wealthy husband, Tom, is half a world away on business. With the chief out and, more importantly, another member of the department vanishing while on a fishing trip, Katherine gets the case, which soon produces some very bad vibes. Meantime, computer expert Vince Nanini, a fixer for Tom, has alerted the Canadian border patrol to look for Misty, whose computer indicates she had made arrangements to meet a young man and take off on a tour of Canada. Vince, a Vin Diesel look-alike, is not impressed with the search effort but pushes Katherine to let him travel with her. The vanishing of Sarah Wilson, the girl Katherine hired to cook dinner for her grandfather, brings back bad memories that are fanned into flame when she learns that The Beekeeper has been released from a Michigan mental institution. Kicked off the case when the department learns of the connection, she’s forced to depend on Vince in her continued search for the two missing girls, who she fears are experiencing exactly what she had years before.
Soule takes a break from her P.J. Benson series (Eat Crow and Die, 2015, etc.) for a hair-raising thriller that breaks no new ground but has all the excitement it needs to keep you reading.Pub Date: March 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4328-3281-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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