An often intriguing, if flawed, novel that fans of formulaic mysteries will likely enjoy.
Small-town Tilton, Virginia, already rife with vice and corruption, adds a serial killer to its ranks in this mystery by Motley (Thrill Kill, 2009, etc.).
While investigating the beheading of an African-American man, Detective Zack Townes and Sgt. Kim Patterson discover that he dealt drugs, and that he was most likely murdered by people masquerading as migrant workers. As more grisly killings occur, Zack and Kim realize that a serial killer may be stalking Tilton. Enter the petite, lovely FBI agent Becky Talley, who quickly becomes the cops’ best friend. Zack is so distracted by the case (and his social life) that he’s disturbingly unconcerned by his teenage daughter Kathy’s arrest on prostitution charges, and he fails to act when she runs away. Meanwhile, Texas native Maria is discharged from a psychiatric hospital, and she seeks revenge on three men who raped her as a young girl and left her for dead. Her quest brings her to Tilton, where, under an assumed name, she becomes a dancer at Big Nasty’s Naughty Women club. She forms an unlikely attachment to the repulsive Big Nasty himself, whose only redeeming qualities seem to be his talents for making money and sexually satisfying women. Maria has only one true target in Tilton, but she doesn’t hesitate to take her revenge on any other middle-aged male who seeks a dalliance with her. Overall, the novel is an absorbing mystery, and its tone is surprisingly noir for a contemporary mystery set during the late summer in the American South. It falls only a little short of being exceptionally good, due to the one-dimensionality of most of its characters and the implausibility of Zack’s disregard for a daughter he claims to love. Similarities of circumstance, the natures of the crimes, and the setting are all that bring the three disparate storylines together, and the abrupt ending is consistent with the lack of development in other aspects of the story.
An often intriguing, if flawed, novel that fans of formulaic mysteries will likely enjoy.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491749388
Page Count: 206
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
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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