Fasten your seat belts for the bumpiest ride in Butch Karp’s long career with the New York D.A.’s office: a case that expands till it gobbles up his wife and daughter. Butch’s latest brief is the execution of Salvatore Bollano capo regime Eddie Catalano, whose rival Joe Pigetti, the obvious candidate for pulling off the hit, has an alibi this wide. While Butch duels with US Attorney Thomas Colombo over who talks to whom about what with which guarantees, his wife, domestic-abuse-vigilante Marlene Ciampi, is busy with her own nest of hornets far from the usual turf of her security agency: the widow of Jumping Jerry Fein, who dived from the observation deck of the Empire State Building 20 years ago, suddenly wants the case reopened. (Why now? wonders Marlene. And why do so many people object?) Busiest of all, though, is Butch and Marlene’s daughter Lucy, 12, who was witness to a murder at the Asia Mall. Now the shooter is very interested in Lucy and the two friends who were with her, Mary Ma and Asia Mall offspring Janice Chen. In real life, or in Tanenbaum’s last novel (Irresistible Impulse, 1997), these three cases would never come within a mile of each other; here, they’re wound together tightly enough to make most readers beg for Motrin. As usual, Tanenbaum pulls off a hundred effective scenes in a dozen different tones—his affection for Butch’s knockabout, have-it-all family is neatly balanced by his brisk malice in showing them and their legion of well-armed allies facing down killers and kidnappers and TV hosts—but the mind-boggling plot, which Marlene compares to an Elizabethan revenge tragedy even while complications are still getting phoned in, drowns in double-crosses, legal maneuvers, and killings. And it’s no surprise when the climax shows Marlene under deadly attack by two parties who don’t even know of each other’s existence. It all adds up to too much of a very good thing indeed.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019218-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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