by Mick Finlay ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019
Better detective work than the series kickoff (Arrowood, 2017) and less emphasis on the hero’s amusingly futile rivalry with...
William Arrowood, the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes, goes looking for a silent bride and finds a cesspool of corruption.
It’s been six months since "weak-minded" Birdie Barclay married pig farmer Walter Ockwell, and in all that time her parents, insurance clerk Dunbar and singing teacher Martha Barclay, haven’t had one word from her. They just want to know she’s all right, they tearfully assure Arrowood and his sidekick and amanuensis, Norman Barnett. Huffing at the much richer pot Holmes got for solving “The Adventure of the Priory School,” Arrowood relieves the Barclays of a trifling sum and sets off for the Ockwell farm, where he intimates that he’s brought news of a legacy to Birdie but is still prevented from seeing her by Walter Ockwell and his sister, Rosanna, who insist that Birdie isn’t home even though Arrowood can see her signaling him from an upstairs window as he leaves. When a more direct attempt to unite Birdie with her parents fails, Arrowood hunkers down to investigate possible skulduggery at the farm, which seems to employ no one but the kinds of mentally challenged patients the Caterham Asylum deals with. For his pains he’s warned off by Sgt. Root, of the Catford and Lewisham Police, and Barnett is soundly beaten. Edna Gillie, a woman who hints at stories of three dead children, disappears herself soon after Arrowood’s one conversation with her, and he fears that she’s dead, and that she’s not the only one. What has Birdie gotten herself into, and can a man who sets himself apart from Holmes by calling himself “an emotional detective. I try and solve my cases by understanding people” extricate her from the danger?
Better detective work than the series kickoff (Arrowood, 2017) and less emphasis on the hero’s amusingly futile rivalry with Holmes even though his case ends up echoing “The Priory School” in more uncomfortable ways than he could have imagined.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6930-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
More by Mick Finlay
BOOK REVIEW
by Mick Finlay
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
29
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.