More a travelogue than a mystery, gilding the lily with clichéd praise for Byron’s prowess and Italy’s beauty.
The second case for an old flame of Lord Byron’s (Claire’s Last Secret, 2018) sends her chasing the ghosts of the romantic poets across Italy.
Claire Clairmont is spending the autumn of her years in genteel poverty in Florence with her niece, Paula, and great-niece, Georgiana. Claire clings to the memories of Byron and their love child, Allegra, both now dead—or so she thinks. She starts to question everything she believes about the past the day her old friend and former paramour Edward Trelawny returns from the wars with a legacy and a secret, both from Byron. The bequest is a sketch of the Boboli Gardens by the great artist Giuseppe Cades, the sale of which could make Claire’s family comfortable. The secret is that Allegra did not die of typhus at age 5, as history records. As proof, Trelawny offers Byron’s memoirs—a hitherto unknown copy of the manuscript burned upon his death. Claire and her family set out to celebrate their good fortune with antipasti and Chianti. While they’re gone, a burglar ransacks their home and steals the Cades sketch. After a fruitless police inquiry, Claire takes it upon herself to interrogate Matteo Ricci, an old nemesis who’s imprisoned for murdering a priest to get his hands on some of Claire’s other valuable memorabilia of Byron and Shelley, on suspicion of masterminding the Cades theft. Ricci is supercilious and unhelpful, so the party sets out for the convent where Allegra spent what might not have been her final days in hopes of learning the truth about her fate. Instead of gathering all possible information before undertaking their journey, Claire chooses to read Byron’s memoir in bits and pieces along the road. The memoir reveals Byron’s revolutionary activities in Ravenna and the threats on his life, and Allegra’s, that may have induced him to fake her death for her own safety. A shadowy rider tracks their carriage on the road to the convent. Will they recover the sketch, find Allegra, and heal Claire’s grieving heart? Stilted prose studded with gratuitous Italian, unformed characters, and an unsatisfying ending make this strictly for devotees of fan fiction.
More a travelogue than a mystery, gilding the lily with clichéd praise for Byron’s prowess and Italy’s beauty.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8992-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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