Fans of this long-running series (Hiss and Hers, 2012, etc.) will feel right at home and find plenty of mirth and mystery.
Agatha Raisin solves the case of the obliging villager whose kindnesses didn’t keep someone from killing her, perhaps for an excellent reason.
When Gloria French first moved to the quiet Cotswold village of Piddlebury, the locals were delighted by her willingness to pitch in by raising money for the church, reading to oldsters and doing many other little jobs nobody wanted to do. So when Gloria’s found dead, poisoned by homemade elderberry wine, a member of the Piddlebury parish council hires Agatha to find the killer. Questions quickly arise. Why did a wealthy woman like Gloria borrow things, insignificant or expensive, from her neighbors and refuse to return them? And did this odd habit provide motive enough for murder? Agatha and one of her assistants, taking up residence in the local pub, soon find that many in the village had cause to hate Gloria. They’re especially interested in the vicar’s wife, who, tired of Gloria’s constant flirting, went to her house on the day of the murder to retrieve a borrowed item. The villagers, claiming that the killer must have been a passing outsider, stick to this story even when one of their own swipes a bottle of wine from Agatha’s car and is found dead. As usual, man-hungry Agatha is attracted to a handsome stranger staying at the pub. She’s livid when her beautiful, clever assistant, Toni, who’s often attracted to unsuitable older men, takes off for Spain with Agatha’s ex-husband. Although the villagers do their best to freeze her out, Agatha isn’t about to let anything stop her from finding a callous killer who’s added her to his list of potential victims.
Fans of this long-running series (Hiss and Hers, 2012, etc.) will feel right at home and find plenty of mirth and mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64013-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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