Blake effortlessly combines a complex puzzle with some fascinating, little-known historical facts.
A coroner finds himself in hot water when the forces of Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the throne, invade England in 1745.
The populace in the Preston area, where coroner Titus Cragg lives, is split between Jacobite supporters of the Bonnie Prince and Hanoverians who support the German George, but both are fearful of being caught up in a war. A constable calls Cragg and his friend Dr. Luke Fidelis (Rough Music, 2019, etc.) to a rural area where a naked headless body has been discovered. Soon enough, they find a head, but it doesn’t go with the body. After discovering a second head and body, Fidelis deduces that the men were Highlanders, perhaps advance scouts. It’s a ticklish case in which the law is murky and their only clue a bit of a tartan. The dead men may have been visiting Barrowclough Hall, home to a father and son with violently opposed political views. After the younger Barrowclough and his servant, Abel Grant, deny any knowledge of the incident, the jury reaches a verdict of death by an unknown hand. The discovery by one of Cragg’s law clients of a purse filled with gold coins involves Cragg in a dangerous situation when the client is killed and his housekeeper accuses the Scots. Then the arrival of the rebel army forces Cragg to house some of the leaders, including the Marquis d’Éguilles, whom Cragg catches trying to rape his wife, Elizabeth. Cragg’s problems grow as he’s arrested for killing the headless Highlanders, escapes with Fidelis’ help, and becomes embroiled with a famous highwayman who claims that the purse full of gold coins is his. It will take all of Cragg’s skills and a bit of luck to uncover the links among all these mysteries and save himself and his family from disaster.
Blake effortlessly combines a complex puzzle with some fascinating, little-known historical facts.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8920-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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