The main dish here is dish, but McNamara’s too diplomatic or starstruck to give her whimsical portraits of stars behaving...
The hard-pressed PR head of a posh Hollywood hotel copes with Oscar madness in L.A. Times writer McNamara’s manic, loose-limbed debut.
Nobody ever said dealing with celebrities was easy, but Juliette Greyson makes it look easy. Whether she’s distributing Oscar Night Survival Kits to the Pinnacle Hotel staff, comforting a maid who’s been lured into a room by an amorous star or keeping her discovery of a corpse in the hotel’s swimming pool secret, nobody beats her ability to make everybody happy. Of course, that ability didn’t extend to screenwriter Josh Singer, her ex-husband, who dumped her for Anna Stewart, the lissome British star of the movie he was able to put together after she fixed his script. Now Josh and Anna are on their way to the Pinnacle, the choice of discerning Oscaristas. So besides having to hold the hand of David Fulbright, who’s about to be fired from his latest movie, and make nice with cancer-stricken megastar Michael O’Connor, whose illness has done nothing to sweeten his temper, Juliette has to play the gracious hostess to the happy couple. But when things go badly, Juliette is never fazed for long—not when Josh is knifed hours after he asks her to give his two latest scripts a once-over and she curses him out in public, not when the cops see her as a logical suspect in his murder. And why should she be fazed, since all hands on deck, from her boss Eamonn Devlin, to the pampered guests, seem determined to take care of her? In short order, Michael has provided her with an alibi and a weekend in Palm Springs, and Eamonn gives her time off and takes her home with him too. Nice work if you can get it.
The main dish here is dish, but McNamara’s too diplomatic or starstruck to give her whimsical portraits of stars behaving madly much of an edge.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3991-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
