A beacon for those who have ever loved a married man and wondered if it would turn out right, plus just enough scientific...
Lost en route to Erasmo Campos’s farm to examine peach rot, plant pathologist Claire Staples (The Shy Tulip Murders, 1996, etc.) stops at Jewell Scoggins’s trailer for directions and is fascinated by the woman’s past, when she went by the name of Cherokee Rose and fronted for a local country band. A day later, Jewell is dead, and Claire and her co-worker Ramon have turned up another body, now reduced to bones and wire-rimmed glasses, on Campos’s property. Could the corpse belong to Elliot Klein, the petroleum engineer who wooed Jewell back in the ’50s, then disappeared without a trace? And whatever happened to his inseparable sidekick Clyde? With the help of Ramon’s brilliant but paranoid cousin, investigative reporter Yolanda—now living in fear of C.C. Tidwell, the subject of one of her all-too-successful exposés—Claire tracks down a former band member, his jealous wife, and Elliot’s younger brother. One more will die and Claire will nearly drown in the Kern River before crimes both old and new are resolved in this complex blend of romance, science, and ingenious clues. Rothenberg, who died before completing the fourth in the series, is well-served by her friend Cannon, who finishes the tale with brio, intelligence, and a respect for the biota of California’s unadmirable San Joaquin Valley.
A beacon for those who have ever loved a married man and wondered if it would turn out right, plus just enough scientific sprinklings to make the reader an instant expert on mycorrhizal fungi.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-880284-43-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and...
Four women with hidden secrets form a group to combat deceit and solve murders.
The ladies of Miracle Springs work in mysterious ways. Former librarian Nora Pennington, owner of Miracle Books, helps people deal with their troubles by recommending specific reading material. Hester Winthrop, owner and baker at the Gingerbread House, creates scones individually tailored to different people’s needs. Estella Sadler, owner of Magnolia Salon and Spa, is a high-maintenance gal with a bad reputation with men. Quiet June Dixon works at the Miracle Springs thermal pools. All are haunted by terrible events that continue to cast long shadows. The ladies’ passing acquaintance with one another deepens when Neil Parrish, a man who’d chatted with Nora and bought a scone from Hester, falls or is pushed in front of a train. After Sheriff Todd calls them in for interviews because they’d all spoken with the dead man, they confide in each other their suspicions that Parrish was murdered despite the sheriff’s ready assumption that his death was suicide. Parrish was one of the partners in Pine Ridge Properties, a new housing development going up near Mineral Springs, and June, who talked to him at the pools, said he seemed to have regrets about the project. Incensed by the way the misogynist sheriff treats them, the ladies form a secret society to investigate. When Nora expresses interest in buying a house in Pine Ridge, she’s surprised to learn that she qualifies for a loan from the local bank run by the sheriff’s brother. As the ladies investigate, another partner in the suspicious building project is killed, and Estella is arrested for his murder. Now the friends are even more determined to discover the truth.
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and both the cunning present-day mystery and the slowly revealed secrets of the intriguing heroines’ pasts.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1237-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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