Six clean-cut criminal adventures for Alvirah Meehan, the $40- million-lottery-winning cleaning lady from Weep No More, My Lady, and her husband, Willy, who no longer sends bills for his plumbing jobs. Their homecoming to New York City in the first story is eventful, since Willy's playwright nephew is arrested for killing an importunate actress in their own Central Park South apartment, with Alvirah discovering both ``The Body in the Closet'' and the telltale clue. ``Death on the Cape'' asks why, and on whose behalf, the witness who sent Cynthia Rogers to prison for murder 12 years ago perjured himself. In the most inventive tale, ``A Clean Sweep,'' Alvirah takes up arms for a recent divorcÇe who claims her ex-husband dumped her so that he could redeem the joint lottery ticket he ``lost'' with his new wife. The title story shows a diamond thief returning to Alvirah's beloved Cypress Point Spa in Pebble Beach, Calif., to kill the man who hired him to perform a fraudulent robbery. Clark's heart isn't really in the details of plotting whodunits like this, but the remaining two stories of kidnapping (a neighbor's baby is snatched in ``Bye, Baby Bunting,'' Willy himself in ``Plumbing for Willy''), which ought to be closer to her home turf, are even thinner. After all, what chance do kidnappers stand when Willy's already fixed their plumbing, and Sister Cordelia and Sister Maeve Marie—who also happen to be his biological sisters—are patrolling the streets inches away from their lair, a Hell's Kitchen flophouse where Alvirah can hire on as a room-service waitress? What lingers in the memory are Clark's paeans to the kind of high-end bourgeois consumerism satirized by Bret Easton Ellis: not just brand-name products and generic crime-fighting gadgets, but the wholesome attitudes her relentlessly upbeat couple has been packaged to sell. (First printing of 500,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86716-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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