A mixed bag from veteran novelist (Grace, 1998, etc.) and TV writer (Hill Street Blues, etc.) Ward. There are several funny...
A down-and-out psychiatrist puts together a ragtag gang to rob one of his clients in this comic caper.
Bob Wells finds himself trapped in a mind-numbing routine and sliding into financial ruin. His marriage recently broke up after 22 years, thanks to his excessive gambling, exacerbated by drink. Suddenly, he’s alone in his mid-50s, living in a dumpy house in a shabby Baltimore neighborhood and scraping together a living as a freelance psychiatric social worker. Both the stream of new clients and the options for obtaining research grants are evaporating. Drinking has become a habit again, and Bob finds himself tempted to gamble. His only pleasure comes on Thursday nights, when he plays with his oldies band, the Rockaholics. They hire a young blonde singer named Jesse Reardon and, for Bob, it’s love at first sight. He fights the attraction for weeks, but when Jesse confesses her love for him, Bob surrenders to his bliss, which soon gives way to doubt and desperation. Jesse declares that she loves his success, but could never care for a guy who was broke. Bob has one wealthy client, the pampered and highly neurotic Emile Bardan, an antiquities dealer whose latest obsession is a priceless Sumerian sun-god mask. Emile is convinced that his archenemy, Colin Edwards, whom he’s convinced murdered his friend Peter, is scheming to steal the mask. Bob puts together a scheme of his own, to improve his financial position by stealing the mask himself and selling it to Edwards. What begins as a simple plan, however, balloons into a complicated challenge. The heist goes not at all as planned, changing Bob’s life forever.
A mixed bag from veteran novelist (Grace, 1998, etc.) and TV writer (Hill Street Blues, etc.) Ward. There are several funny setups and quirky characters, but the prose often strains for humor and edge.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35780-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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