FBI agent Jack Harper has no choice but to solve a kidnapping after Harper’s wanna-be girlfriend, Michelle Wu, car thief and chop-shop expert, telephones that her sister is missing.
In Ward's (Total Immunity, 2009, etc.) latest, Michelle is in Santa Fe visiting sister Jennifer, a nurse at Blue Wolf Lodge, a posh New Age health resort. Jack is anticipating two weeks off, maybe with a relaxing fishing trip to Baja California. But Jack cannot refuse Michelle. Ever ambitious, Michelle also intended to meet Lucky Avila in Santa Fe. Lucky leads the dope-dealing, hard-riding Sons of Satan biker gang. Michelle thought a hookup with Lucky would add to her illicit chop-shop cash-flow. Jennifer unsuspectingly tagged along, and the sisters met Lucky high on his own product. Lucky proposed a menage á trois, and Michelle’s refusal came at knife point. Later Jennifer goes missing. Michelle suspects revenge. Jack hits town, sneaks into Lucky’s El Coyote motel compound but doesn’t find Jennifer. Jack confronts Lucky, who hints Jennifer may have been taken as raw material for the sex trade. That sends Jack to the Jackalope, a brothel run by the Jesters, another cycle gang. Ward loves odd characters. Lucky’s sidekick, the massive, slow-witted Zollie, has a pet javelina named Ole Big. Jester chief Pancho Flores runs the bordello but spouts sex-as-liberation jive. The deceptively vigorous Alex Williams heads Blue Wolf, where enough money buys tai chi, plastic surgery and Fountain of Youth chemistry. There are subplots, one featuring a strong-arm thief named Johnny Z, who preys on the elderly and ends up double-crossed. The other, not relevant to what’s happening in Santa Fe, finds Jack’s teenage son, Kevin, seduced into a torrid affair with a perverted but beautiful older librarian, a dalliance tacked on as if Ward wanted to use notes for a book not worth developing.
Crime fiction, yes, but crime fiction with a macabre, “too much is never enough,” edge-of-believability resolution.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2601-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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