The O’Shaughnessy sisters (Pamela and Mary writing as Perri) are shameless overplotters, but give them a courtroom they can...
More trials—of the heart, too—for Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly in the O’Shaughnessy sisters’ seventh legal potboiler (Move to Strike, 2000, etc.).
To begin with, it’s love that furrows Nina’s pretty brow. The question is: How does she really feel about ex-homicide detective Paul van Wagoner? Yes, of course, there are days when she can’t keep her hands off his hunkish torso, but that’s just randiness, isn’t it? Or is it? At any rate, before she can—in a manner of speaking—sink her teeth into the problem, Nina gets the kind of case her teeth were made for. A young woman has hit a slot machine jackpot to the tune of seven million plus, and she wants help collecting the money. What complicates matters is her unwillingness to reveal her real name. The casino authorities regard that as a deal-breaker. No proof of identity, no pay-off, they insist, a position the IRS finds sympathetic. Swearing confidentiality, Nina persuades the woman to tell her story. She’s a widow, it turns out, her husband having recently drowned. A tragic accident, she tells Nina, but the deceased’s rich, powerful, and distraught father refuses to believe it. He blames her, hates her, and has pursued her vengefully, though at the moment his virulence appears to be in remission. Were her real name to get in the papers, however, he’d have all the stimulus he needed to come after her again—her and her baby. Well, she’s right, and it’s the baby who’s pivotal in the intense legal warfare Nina’s soon waging with her usual panache. As for that other trial—randiness vs. true love—a verdict has yet to be rendered.
The O’Shaughnessy sisters (Pamela and Mary writing as Perri) are shameless overplotters, but give them a courtroom they can cut and slash in, and they entertain with the best.Pub Date: July 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33483-4
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
