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
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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