As usual, the historical insights are offset by Torie’s narcissism. But the tighter, more suspenseful plot tips the balance...
Torie O’Shea, the most dedicated genealogist in New Kassell, Missouri (Killing Cousins, 2002, etc.), wonders why Stephanie Connelly, a young woman with the familiar-looking eyes, keeps staring at her. When Stephanie reveals it’s because she’s Torie’s half-sister, Torie’s not surprised to learn that her father had an affair, but has a much harder time accepting the fact that he’s withheld the news from her. The former only child must cope with this life-changing revelation at the same time that her beloved New Kassell is confronted once more by its own past: The historically low level of the Mississippi River uncovers the wreck of the Phantom, a steamboat that sank in 1919. Soon journalists and historians arrive, interested because wealthy heiress Jessica Huntleigh and 26 others died in the wreck, and fortune-hunters appear, drawn by the never-recovered suitcase of uncut diamonds supposedly carried by a Phantom passenger. Bradley Chapel, television journalist, pushes hard to get access to the Historical Society files, and Professor Jacob Lahrs and his two assistants, Jeremiah Ketchum and Danny Jones, use their academic credentials to start diving among the wreckage. When Torie finds Professor Lahrs murdered, the professor who claimed not to believe in the diamonds becomes the wreck’s 28th casualty. In the end, Torie sorts out a riverboat version of the Titanic movie, fingers the killers, and happily accepts the new branch of her family tree.
As usual, the historical insights are offset by Torie’s narcissism. But the tighter, more suspenseful plot tips the balance in MacPherson’s favor.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30171-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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