The mixture is as before, with a bit less of everything except suspects and red herrings.
The latest from Clark (The Sleeping Beauty Killer, 2016, etc.) is retro even for her: the maiden voyage of a trans-Atlantic ship crammed with more beautiful people, gossips, thieves, and killers than Death on the Nile—or her own daughter Carol Higgins Clark’s 1992 debut, Decked.
If you don’t already know, billionaire owner Gregory Morrison will be happy to tell you that the Queen Charlotte is the most luxurious ship to take to the seas since the Titanic. Among its stratospherically upscale appointments are invited lecturers Henry Longworth (Shakespeare) and Celia Kilbride (gemology) and a passenger list that includes Lady Emily Haywood, who owns the fabulous but famously cursed Cleopatra emerald necklace; her companion, Brenda Martin; her investment adviser, Roger Pearson, and Roger’s wife, Yvonne; Kansas divorcée Anna DeMille, who won the cruise in a church raffle; Ted Cavanaugh, an attorney trying to get Lady Em to return the necklace to Egypt; “the man with one thousand faces,” who’s bent on stealing the necklace; and Devon Michaelson, the Interpol agent charged with protecting the necklace. How does this all work out? After two murderous attacks, Morrison tells Michaelson in some exasperation, “Well, I must say you’ve done a lousy job,” and it’s hard to disagree. On the other hand, the accommodations are superb, the food and drinks unexcelled, the lectures informative, and the necklace safer than you might think because the thief keeps attacking its keepers just after they’ve passed it off to someone else. Long-ago lottery winners Alvirah and Willy Meehan, familiar to Clark fans (The Lottery Winner, 1994, etc.), are on hand to celebrate their 45th anniversary and provide what Alvirah considers great detective work, though even fans may be unimpressed on this score.
The mixture is as before, with a bit less of everything except suspects and red herrings.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3111-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.
V.I. Warshawski’s search for a homeless woman with a fraught past leads her deep into a series of political conspiracies that stretch over generations and continents.
Bernadine Fouchard, V.I.’s goddaughter, thinks that Lydia Zamir, whose songs about strong women she reveres, was shot dead along with her lover, Hector Palurdo, at a Kansas fundraiser four years ago. She’s only half right. The 17 victims ranch hand Arthur Morton shot in Horsethief Canyon include Palurdo but not Zamir, whom V.I. and Bernie happen to hear banging out haunting tunes on a toy piano under a Chicago railroad viaduct. But they glimpse her only momentarily before the traumatized musician flees and eventually disappears. Soon afterward, Bernie finds herself in trouble when the young man she’s been dating—Leo Prinz, a summer employee of SLICK, the South Lakefront Improvement Council—is murdered and she becomes a person of considerable interest to Sgt. Lenora Pizzello. The search for Lydia Zamir morphs into an investigation of her relationship with Palurdo, an activist against the Pinochet regime in Chile long before he was shot apparently at random. In the meantime, the disappearance of Simon Lensky, one of SLICK’s elected managers, throws a spotlight on the organization’s controversial proposal for a new landfill on the South Side. Everyone in the city seems to have strong opinions about the proposal, from Gifford Taggett, superintendent of the Chicago Park District, to Nobel Prize–winning economist Larry Nieland, to an inveterate protestor known only as Coop, who kicks off the story by vanishing after parking his dog with V.I., to her consternation and the ire of her neighbors and her own two dogs. As usual, Paretsky (Shell Game, 2018, etc.) is less interested in identifying whodunit than in uncovering a monstrous web of evil, and this web is one of her densest and most finely woven ever.
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243592-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.
A teenager with a troubled past becomes the prime suspect in a string of brutal murders, but ex–FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his partner, Rainie Conner, think there’s more to the story.
For the past three years, Pierce and Rainie have fostered Sharlah Nash, now 13, with the hope of soon adopting her. Sharlah’s childhood is the epitome of troubled: when she was 5, her drug-addict father killed her mother and then tried to kill her and her older brother, Telly, but Telly, then 9, bashed his head in with a baseball bat. The siblings were fostered apart, with Sharlah ending up with Pierce and Rainie, whose expertise as parents seems to come from their combined resumes as a former criminal profiler and cop, respectively. Telly, we learn in expansive flashbacks from the now-teenager’s point of view (Sharlah has her own, crowding an already packed narrative), bounced around before landing, age 17, with Frank and Sandra Duvall, a kind couple who are obviously not what they seem. In what appears to be an explosion of unexplained rage, Telly allegedly murders the Duvalls and then kills two people in a gas station before heading off into the Oregon woods, sparking a manhunt and fears that he’s coming after Sharlah. Pierce and Rainie (last seen in Say Goodbye, 2008) work with local law enforcement to build a psychological profile of the teen—which is questionable given the excessive amount of guesswork and second- and thirdhand information used—while trying to protect their daughter from harm.
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-95458-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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