HOLD A SCORPION

Name: HOLD A SCORPION
Author: Melodie Johnson Howe
ISBN: 978-1-60598-967-9

by Melodie Johnson Howe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2016

Howe (City of Mirrors, 2013, etc.) sets her story in Tinseltown, but her characters lack the pop of classic Hollywood...

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An aging actress turns amateur investigator after word gets out that she knows more than she’s telling about the pedestrian victim of a car accident.

In the wake of her actress mother’s death, Diana Poole, a fading star in her own right, is just trying to make it to her next audition. She’s too old and wise to get mixed up again in Hollywood, especially after breaking one of her own rules by getting involved with co-star Peter Bianchi on the set of her last film. Lesson learned, Diana is set to move on from Peter even if he can’t stop showing up at her door or calling her about her Twitter posts on their status. Out on the town with her friend and neighbor Ryan Johns, Diana sees a woman wave to them and move as if to approach them. But the woman, a stranger to them both, is run down before she reaches them. Diana and Ryan, both spooked by the death, react in very different ways. Ryan immerses himself in a new relationship with a woman Diana grows suspicious about when she sees the two of them, of all things, running together. Diana herself seeks closure through learning the identity of the woman. Her suspicion that she may not be the only one investigating is confirmed when she’s held at gunpoint by a man who insists she knows more than she does. Daunted yet determined, Diana also learns that investigator Leo Heath, her boyfriend who never was, is also looking into the case. Maybe Leo can convince Diana to protect herself from whatever it is the mystery woman was trying to tell her.

Howe (City of Mirrors, 2013, etc.) sets her story in Tinseltown, but her characters lack the pop of classic Hollywood despite hints throughout at her ability to do more.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-60598-967-9

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Pegasus Crime

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
CITY OF MIRRORS
by Melodie Johnson Howe

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BEAUTY DIES
by Melodie Johnson Howe

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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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)