Bowen provides more social commentary than usual in this lighthearted series, revealing the careless bigotry and racism of...
Exotic animals, unbridled sex, and murder provide all the necessaries for a perfect honeymoon.
Lady Georgiana Rannoch (Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding, 2018, etc.) may no longer be 35th in line to the throne, but she’s finally Mrs. Darcy O’Mara. Although she and Darcy return to Rannoch House to go through wedding presents, Darcy promises her an exotic honeymoon, and when the queen offers them the use of Balmoral at a garden party, he announces that they’re going instead to Kenya. They fly with Rowena Hartley, a mean girl at Georgie's school, and her brother, Rupert, both on a visit to their father, who wants to see the children he’s ignored for years now that he’s become Lord Cheriton. An even worse fellow passenger is Mrs. Simpson, who plans to spend time with the Prince of Wales. Georgie has always suspected that Darcy’s some kind of spy, and she’s uneasy that the trip’s been arranged by government official Freddie Blanchford but eager to stay with Diddy Ruocco in the infamous Happy Valley, where they meet lots of aristocrats who live in high style. Darcy admits that he’s on the trail of a jewel thief, but Georgie suspects he’s holding back a bigger secret. When they dine with Lord Cheriton, aka Bwana Hartley, he makes a hard pass at Georgie and displays his short temper and Nazi sympathies. Invited to one of Lady Idina’s wild overnight parties, they realize that the couples spend all night changing partners. A shocked Georgie spends a restless night alone with Darcy until they sneak out early in the morning only to discover Bwana’s car in the middle of the road and his partly eaten body nearby. From that point on, the beauties of Kenya take a back seat to sleuthing, which disturbs someone enough to bait wild animals to kill them.
Bowen provides more social commentary than usual in this lighthearted series, revealing the careless bigotry and racism of the aristocratic Brits in Kenya, and the tale is all the better for it.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49284-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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