This chick-lit thriller lacks finesse but never stops throwing colorful subplots at you and never lets up the pace.
A feisty Manhattan attorney struggles against drug thugs and a dangerous attraction to a hunky FBI agent.
In the middle of the night, federal prosecutor Melanie Vargas is called to a grim murder scene. Wealthy teen Whitney Seward’s been found dead of an overdose in her Park Avenue bedroom along with her best friend Brianna Meyers. Melanie suspects that Carmen Reyes, a third girl recently seen with them, may hold the key to the mystery. But she doesn’t know that studious Carmen, whose father Luis, the building’s superintendent, pressed her into Whitney’s fast crowd, is being held captive by an unidentified kidnapper. Headmistress Patricia Andover, at the exclusive school the three girls attended, offers full cooperation, but starchy lawyer Ted Siebert balks at every turn. Meanwhile, Patricia is secretly having an affair with Whitney’s stepfather James and is extorting money from the school to boot. Whitney’s alcoholic mother Caroline is often drunk and may have been home at the time of her daughter’s death. Brianna’s boyfriend Trevor eagerly goes undercover, to the discomfort of Melanie, who thinks he’s a loose cannon. If these and other crosscurrents make the case complex for Melanie, her personal life raises the bar. She’s recently separated from her philandering husband Steve and raising a baby daughter alone. The FBI assigns Dan O’Reilly, the agent Melanie nearly fell into bed with during a previous assignment (Most Wanted, 2005), whose clueless sidekick Bridget also seems to have the hots for him. When forensic evidence points to foul play, the investigating team, helped by Melanie’s sis Linda, a trendy entertainment reporter, gets access to Screen, the club where Whitney’s dealer hung out. The trail takes Melanie and company to Puerto Rico, leaving Trevor behind in mortal danger.
This chick-lit thriller lacks finesse but never stops throwing colorful subplots at you and never lets up the pace.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-072400-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more—including some residue from that first case that just won’t go away.
Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz’s home to find out why he hasn’t joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he’d crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she’d been to Fultz’s house that she sold the car she’d driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim’s ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: “Look for some little gal who’s into bondage.” McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that’s evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she’s implicated in the case. But he’s set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence (“I wasn’t good at faith. I was good at proof”).
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53556-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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