by Martha Grimes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2014
Though newcomers may find Jury enigmatic without a complete back story (The Black Cat, 2010, etc.), the character sketches...
Richard Jury returns to investigate four deaths separated by time and geography.
When Scotland Yard Superintendant Richard Jury meets Tom Williamson at Vertigo 42, a bar atop one of London’s financial towers, Williamson asks him to reopen a couple of long-ago deaths. Williamson lost his wife, Tess, 17 years ago, when she apparently suffered an attack of vertigo and fell down the stairs of their Devonshire country house. Five years earlier, she’d given a party there for six children, one of whom died in a draining pool. Tess was acquitted of any wrongdoing, but she never got over the incident. After Jury starts looking into the case, he's inclined to agree with Williamson that someone with vertigo probably wouldn’t have fallen all the way to the bottom of the stairs, and there were easier, more foolproof means of suicide. Jury’s also invited to investigate the case of a red-gowned woman found dead at the foot of a tower in Northamptonshire, near the home of Melrose Plant. Plant, the former Lord Ardry and Jury’s unofficial sidekick, applies his own investigative style whenever he can be torn away from Soufflé Day and other aspects of the perfect life at his estate. Even with Plant’s help, Jury is hard-pressed to make sense of a lost dog, mysterious changes of outfit, a fourth body, and the prevailing questions of whether and how the four deaths are related. The unseen but deeply felt presence of the generous, warmhearted Tess inspires Jury and his team to persevere in seeking justice for her and peace for her husband in a deftly plotted tale balancing wry humor and poignancy without sentimentality.
Though newcomers may find Jury enigmatic without a complete back story (The Black Cat, 2010, etc.), the character sketches Grimes (The Way of All Fish, 2014, etc.) provides are more satisfying than other authors’ full portraits. Longtime fans will find this tale fully worthy of Jury and his regulars.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2402-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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