A rum brew alternating between arch 1970 chatter and the hero’s melodramatic first-person account of his wartime adventures...
A posh party to celebrate Albert Campion’s 70th birthday offers the occasion for the guest of honor to reminisce at length about his hush-hush service during World War II.
Even Campion recognizes that he’s not the obvious choice to get smuggled into occupied France for reasons to be disclosed later. But his department head, L.C. “Elsie” Corkran, presses him to accept the mission, and soon he’s gamely attempting to establish his bona fides as Canadian diplomat Jean-Baptiste Hamelin. Unimpressed, a pair of thugs working for Marseilles gang leader Paul Pirani waylay him and begin to beat him up until he’s rescued by his contact, Freiherr Robert von Ringer, the enigmatic German agent who asked the Brits for cooperation. The target is Nathan Lunel, a Jewish banker who was involved in an extensive web of currency transfers before he was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Les Milles. The task is to get custody of Lunel’s detailed financial records. The big questions are (1) how Campion, even carrying the credentials of Ringer warehouseman Didier Ducret, will ever be able to infiltrate the camp so that he can negotiate with Lunel, and (2) why Robert wants to betray his country and work with the English in the first place. The first of these turns out to not be a serious problem, and the second is eventually brushed aside so that Ripley (Mr Campion’s Abdication, 2017, etc.) can concentrate on what really interests him: an attack on one of Campion’s birthday guests, many of whom turn out to have close ties to the story he’s telling, by another with the knife that should have been reserved for cutting the cake.
A rum brew alternating between arch 1970 chatter and the hero’s melodramatic first-person account of his wartime adventures that, despite an unexpected attack of birthday-party violence, never quite jells.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8809-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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