A Hollywood screenwriter sorts out much of the very big mess a pretty lady has got herself into—from pseudonymous CIA veteran Donoghue (The Dublin Affair, 1988, etc.). Marine Vietnam vet and TV hack Joe Brent meets beautiful Melissa Tarkos on the mean streets of his own neighborhood, where, in her designer frock and fur-piece, she is most out of place. Rescuing her from the unwanted attentions of local toughs, Joe takes her to his crummy room for a bath and a chat. Is she a hooker? Who else would be out on the sidewalk in such a get-up? But she's so beautiful. And awfully nice. It turns out that Melissa, girded in a diamond-and-cash-stuffed money belt, is fleeing her husband. She spends a chaste night and then leaves before Joe wakes up; but Joe, badly smitten, follows up a newspaper ad and discovers that his new love is the wife of Borden Tarkos, a creepy movie mogul with mob connections. A plea for more help from Melissa leads to a reunion and subsequent healthy adult activities. In love, but still levelheaded, Joe steers Melissa to the feds, where she trades knowledge of hubby's criminal activities for witness protection. But hubby's arm is long, and Melissa is forced to rejoin Tarkos and sail with him to the Mediterranean, leaving Joe to face the mob, who want the diamonds and all the cash Tarkos skimmed from their joint Vegas operations. Escaping anonymous death at the hands of mobsters in Baja California, Joe hunkers down in his mortgaged sailboat and plots, trying to ignore the squeals coming from a nearby boat where two fun-loving ladies are taking on all comers. Teaming with a jolly Mexican-American treasury agent, and then with the squealy ladies, Joe wreaks violent and un-writerly revenge on the movie mogul and the mob—then waits for his love to return from the Cote d`Azur. Two-fisted, inelegant, and rather rambly.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1992
ISBN: 1-55611-326-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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