A superior example of the plucky-heroine-in-an-old-dark-house school.
Hilda Adams, less than an official police detective but a whole lot more than a trained nurse, is dispatched to a family manse to protect the matriarch from all manner of things that go bump in the night in this reprint originally published in 1942.
Old Eliza Fairbanks maintains that somebody tried to poison her with arsenic. But it’s hard to know what to make of her claim since she also insists that her bedroom’s been invaded by “three bats, two sparrows, and a rat” in the months since her sugar was doctored. So Inspector Harlan Fuller sends Hilda (Miss Pinkerton, 1932) into the Fairbanks home, partly to protect the querulous old lady, partly to keep an eye out for further mischief. Hilda finds plenty of mischief, from the bat Mrs. Fairbanks has caught that very day to the test Dr. Courtney Brooke ran that proves that her sugar was indeed laced with arsenic. Quizzed by Hilda, Mrs. Fairbanks tells her that she trusts her servants more than her family, and it’s easy to see why. Her daughter, Marian, has bled her architect ex-husband, Frank, dry by the $10,000 in alimony he pays her each year. Shortly after their divorce seven years ago, Frank married his daughter’s governess, and now Eileen Garrison announces that she’s pregnant. Although Frank and Marian’s daughter, Janice, is selflessly attached to her grandmother, the same can’t be said for Marian’s brother, Carlton, a stockbroker ruined by the Depression, or his wife, Susie. As the family members bicker and the suspicious incidents mount, Rinehart wrings the maximum effect from her trademark flash forwards, here presented in a flat third-person, as when she begins a chapter by leaping three days into the future: “Mrs. Fairbanks was murdered on Saturday night, the fourteenth of June; or rather early on Sunday morning.” The solution to the locked-room murder relies on some state-of-the-art technology that’s dated severely, but nostalgia buffs won’t mind a bit.
A superior example of the plucky-heroine-in-an-old-dark-house school.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61316-159-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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