by Robin Blake ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
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
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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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