When private detective Dan Lord’s nephew and sister-in-law die under mysterious circumstances, he must call on all his resources to bring evildoers to justice in Gilleo’s (Sweat, 2012, etc.) third novel.
Lord is a Washington, D.C., private detective who specializes in brokering extralegal solutions to the problems of the powerful. Readers meet him as he blackmails an abusive federal judge into signingdivorce papers and withdrawing threats against the judge’s wife. Once Gilleo establishes Lord’s character and modus operandi, he gets into the meat of the story: the apparent death-by-overdose of his college-age nephew, Conner, and the subsequent suicide of Lord’s widowed sister-in-law, Vicky. The detective believes that the deaths aren’t what they seem, and he sets out to investigate. Along the way, he calls on a new intern with a surprising array of information at her fingertips, a Russian intelligence contact, a paranoid tech whiz, a high-priced madam and two D.C. police officers who are decidedly on the fence about Lord’s involvement in the case. It turns out that the case involves corruption deep within the government intelligence community, and the forces arrayed against Lord are deep-pocketed, legally untouchable and personally unsavory. Gilleo has the thriller mystery formula down pat, providing the right mix of investigation and action, and the right balance of distrustful authority figures and trusted colleagues. The climax, which includes several twists, is where the novel falls apart somewhat; readers will easily guess one undercover agent’s identity. The prime mover behind the entire situation, however, is a real surprise, although the story doesn’t seem particularly concerned with who’s ultimately giving the orders. Finally, the key behind Conner’s suspicious death is tied to a piece of information that Lord knew all along, but was hidden from readers, which may leave them feeling cheated rather than entertained.
A thriller with plenty of action, gadgetry and intrigue, although the conclusion is a bit of a letdown.
Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1611881455
Page Count: 368
Publisher: The Story Plant
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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