No one can con a con like an ex-con with a good heart and even better friends.
A car thief–turned-agent for Florida Child Protective Services defends an 11-year-old girl from a wide array of predators.
There’s nothing like a gun in your face to wake you up from a dream about your Aunt Shayna’s brisket, as Foggy Moscowitz discovers one morning in 1976. Nelson Roan, the man behind the gun, has broken out of prison to find his daughter, Etta, and he needs help from Foggy. Fry’s Bay is a long way from Brooklyn, where Foggy grew up, and his current job for the state under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act is a big change from his former career of boosting cars. But it’s Foggy’s way of making amends for his criminal past. The next morning, Roan is gone, but Foggy’s still determined to find Etta, who has an eidetic memory, apparently knows something that a good many other people would like to know, and has been adopted by a couple who may not have her best interests at heart. A few secret messages from Etta, including one on her dog’s collar, lead Foggy to the child, who’s a person of such interest to mobsters from both Manhattan and Montreal as well as a couple of dirty cops and the FBI that Foggy decides to stash her with his friend John Horse, the tribal boss of the local Seminoles. Added to a flourishing marijuana trade, a casino venture, Etta’s father’s recent murder of the doctor who treated Etta’s mother, a switch of identities in the local hospital, and the possibility that at least two of the people in the fray aren’t who they say they are is the ongoing mystery of what Etta knows that puts her life at such risk. For all his craftiness, it’s hard work for Foggy, even with Aunt Shayna’s intervention, to stay one step ahead in his brisk and wryly funny fourth caper (Icepick, 2018, etc.).
No one can con a con like an ex-con with a good heart and even better friends.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8957-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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