This sequel to The Cracked Spine (2016) is rich in Scottish dialect and eccentric characters, including a well-meaning...
A murder at a Scottish castle reveals a murky past.
Kansas transplant Delaney Nichols and her protective landlord drive to Castle Doune outside Edinburgh to do a favor for her boss, Edwin MacAlister. Purveyor of rare books and manuscripts, Edwin owns The Cracked Spine bookstore in Edinburgh, and he’s asked Delaney to pick up a vintage comic book from a William Wallace re-enactor. They find the re-enactor in full costume and as dead as Wallace, with the comic book half-hidden on the castle roof. The dead man, Billy Armstrong, was the son of Gordon Armstrong, an old friend of Edwin’s, though the two men fell out 50 years ago and Gordon supposedly died in a recent fire. Almost immediately, Gordon shows up at the bookstore, very much alive and smelling of fish from the market where he works under an assumed name, accusing Edwin of having something to do with his son's death. Assisted by her boyfriend, Tom, Delaney returns to the castle to try to find a paper—a handwritten account of why Gordon has been in hiding—that was supposedly inside the book. Instead they turn up a dirk—a foot-long Scottish knife—and a business card printed with the name “Grizel Sheehy, Bagpipes,” that has Billy’s last name written on the back. Delaney’s fondness for Edwin leads her to lie to the police, nose her way into other people’s business, and walk into danger as she attempts to find out not only who killed Billy, but what really happened 50 years ago to come between Gordon, Edwin, and other members of a secret society. Is the real message to Edwin the dirk that Delaney found? How many times will the name William figure into past and present mysteries? Did Grizel kill Billy with her bagpipes? And will all the literary voices—quotations from fictional characters—help Delaney find the answers she seeks or get her killed?
This sequel to The Cracked Spine (2016) is rich in Scottish dialect and eccentric characters, including a well-meaning heroine who brings on most of her own troubles.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05749-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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