Taut, riveting story in which apparitions and corporeal baddies remain comparably terrifying.
A paranormal team’s investigation into spirits in Maryland exposes nefarious deeds that come with a human threat in this suspense novel.
When the Frederick County Landmarks Foundation suspects “something” is wrong with one of its historical buildings, the Dulany Paranormal Team takes the case. The 200-year-old home, Beacon’s Way, is a hub of recent unexplained events, including a mysterious leak in the ceiling and a heavy armoire that seemingly moves on its own. Team member and photographer Kayla Dunn snaps some pictures of the house and is shaken by what appears to be a specter staring at her. Investigating with her colleagues Parker Troxell and Henry Marfoh, Kayla looks into other local hauntings, all eventually linked by trompe l’oeil paintings, works with three-dimensional optical illusions. At the same time, there’s an equally unnerving human element, from a note that warns the foundation’s vice president to steer clear of Beacon’s Way to someone directly threatening Parker. There’s also the body that Kayla stumbles on—a Jane Doe and an indisputable homicide. Unfortunately, more killings follow, and the possible presence of phantoms may not be the greatest danger for Frederick County or the Dulany Team. Allen’s (Lies Beneath Ellicott City, 2015, etc.) novel is an engaging fusion of ghost story and thriller. The focus is primarily on the mystery: Humans are a definite menace but their objective is unclear, while the existence of spirits is initially vague. The intermittent merging of the two investigations—the Dulany Team’s and Detective Nick Nucci working the murders—further deepens the mystery with probable connections. The author grounds the paranormal sleuths with signs of their expertise, like relevant terminology: apport (an object appearing through spiritual means) versus asport (an object that a ghost takes or moves). But along with the realism, there are wonderful instances of spookiness; when Kayla carefully peruses her photos of Beacon’s Way, she spots a previously unseen individual who had been hiding.
Taut, riveting story in which apparitions and corporeal baddies remain comparably terrifying.Pub Date: June 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9552-1
Page Count: 338
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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