Strong scenic detail and a winning heroine make it easy to skip the tangled lineages, obvious red herrings, and...
Slow-starting police procedural examines Main Line society through the eyes of an unusually sensitive working-class homicide detective.
After exploring social and personal pathologies among Massachusetts’s wealthy classes in two books featuring former DA Frances Pratt (Redemption, 2003, etc.), Geary now visits Philadelphia’s suburban upper-class WASP preserve in the persona of Lucy O’Malley, the daughter of a Boston cop who has been recently promoted to the Philadelphia police department’s homicide division. A habitué of Arch, an artsy Rittenhouse Square bar and grill within walking distance of PD headquarters, Lucy becomes romantically entangled with the bar’s owner, Archer Haverill. Scion of a dysfunctional old-money Main Line family, Archer is estranged from his mother, psychiatrist Morgan Reese. The rich/poor contrasts give the romance some spice as Geary shifts the focus to Reese, now the psychiatrist most likely to head the University of Pennsylvania’s new mental health institute. Troubled by the twins she gave up for adoption many years ago after an affair, Reese resolves to let them know who their mommy is—after all, they live practically around the corner with their chilly, loveless, but comfortably rich adoptive parents Faith and Bill Herbert. Then darkly depressed Foster Herbert, who has learned he was adopted but doesn’t know Reese is his biological mother, apparently commits suicide. O’Malley, who works Philadelphia only, doesn’t get involved professionally until about 80 pages later, when Reese is found dead in her car, seemingly shot and bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Geary is best when she balances O’Malley’s clue gathering with a wide-eyed exploration of existing and imaginary Philadelphia locations. She’s careful to show the Main Line rich as more than a sad, clueless crowd with too much money, and her cop is vulnerable enough to make mistakes, competent enough to keep plugging.
Strong scenic detail and a winning heroine make it easy to skip the tangled lineages, obvious red herrings, and too-good-to-be-true ending.Pub Date: July 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53217-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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