by Mary Miley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2016
Despite an overburdened plot that still leaves one mystery unresolved, readers will welcome this third showcase for a...
An amateur sleuth takes a nostalgic journey straight into danger to solve a Jazz Age murder.
Any Hollywood hopeful would envy Jessie Beckett, an assistant script girl for Douglas Fairbanks. She also doubles for Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart” and Jessie’s longtime idol. But Jessie’s job description changes when Mary introduces her to one of the cameramen for the Pickford–Fairbanks Studios. He was a juror for the murder trial of Ruby Glynn, accused of murdering her rival Lila Walker, and he’s haunted because he gave in to pressure to find her guilty. The evidence against Ruby, now facing the gallows, was so compelling that there was no police investigation; now Mary wants Jessie to do what the cops didn’t. With some success in outwitting gangsters, a previous gig as an impersonator, and the survivor’s instincts of someone who’s been on her own since she was a child, Jessie (Silent Murders, 2014, etc.) is clearly the right one for the job. Pretending to be interested in renting Lila’s newly available boardinghouse suite, she sees the place where Lila was stabbed and Ruby was found in a faint with a bloody knife in her hand. Although Ruby has lost hope, her suitor, a handsome Cuban actor who gets the roles Rudolph Valentino turns down, wants Jessie to clear Ruby’s name. Jessie finds evidence that Lila was blackmailing various Hollywood luminaries. The identity of one of her targets may be on an old program from the small-time vaudeville circuit Jessie traveled as a child. So she rejoins it as a member of a song-and-dance sister act in hopes of finding someone who remembers the people named on the program. The startling answer—and an ageless tale of jealousy and revenge—avails her little when, like a runaway train, her fortunes careen from one peril to another before reaching an only partially satisfying conclusion.
Despite an overburdened plot that still leaves one mystery unresolved, readers will welcome this third showcase for a valiant heroine with a shady past.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8653-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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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by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
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
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