A fast-paced, often thrilling tale, with the economic plight of an artist living in a high-rent neighborhood as an...
In Khoury’s debut novel, a struggling painter who’s looking for an art dealer meets a drug dealer instead—and danger ensues.
Short on rent and desperate for cash, Regina “Gina” McKenna is about to get a citation for attempting to sell her paintings in a Laguna Beach, California, park without a permit when Jason Cavalieri, owner of Cabaret Restaurant, comes to her rescue. He buys a painting on the spot and invites her to a party, promising that he’ll introduce her to his wealthy friends. Instead, he entangles her in his secret drug-dealing operation—and a murder plot—just as Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Bobby Garcia homes in on Jason’s business partner, Miguel Lopez, as a suspect in his investigation. The action unfolds in short, punchy chapters as Gina tries to extract herself from Jason’s grip while the police and the other drug dealers try to find out how much she knows about her new benefactor. In one especially exciting scene, a criminal dangles from a plane in midair, desperately trying to climb back inside before he plummets into the Pacific Ocean. Orange County is known for its beautiful coastline and sunny skies; Khoury’s story shows a darker side, including a growing housing crisis and a failing war on drugs. The protagonist’s anxiety is palpable as she cold-calls art galleries and passes out homemade fliers to try to sell her work so that she can pay for the small space she rents from a family who’s struggling to pay the mortgage. Deputy District Attorney Tom Halloway, who develops a soft spot for Gina while he works on her case, is also quick to provide statistics on how legalizing drugs would save resources and reduce crime. Gina is shown to be naïve but scrappy, and when she lands in jail for a crime she didn’t commit, she cowers before shifty inmates and unscrupulous guards—until a street-savvy prostitute shows her the ropes, giving her a fighting chance.
A fast-paced, often thrilling tale, with the economic plight of an artist living in a high-rent neighborhood as an unexpected bonus.Pub Date: April 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68409-770-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Page Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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