It’s high time for Baxter to patch things up with Paniatowski, before their continuing feud overshadows Spencer’s deft...
Chief Constable George Baxter continues to harass DCI Monika Paniatowski.
Since the death of his wife in an alcohol-fueled car crash, Baxter has been out to undermine Monika (Death’s Dark Shadow, 2014, etc.). Now he’s stuck his former lover with an assignment no self-respecting detective would tolerate: acting as adviser to the estate manager of Stamford Hall, where Gervaise de Courtney, 13th Earl of Ridley, plans to host a rock music festival. The assignment has some rewards. Katerina, Countess of Ridley, a Central European refugee who was rescued by her husband from the horrors of the 1968 Prague Spring, is a kindred spirit. And estate manager Edward Bell is compassionate, if somewhat oversold on loyalty to his employers. But the limitations of her position prey on Monika. She’s forbidden by the earl to meet with the folks he’s handpicked to handle security for the festival—a motorcycle gang called the Devil’s Disciples—because they don’t like police. And Baxter insists she stay at Stamford Hall 24/7 for the duration of the festival. While she’s stuck at the manor house, there’s a juicy murder to investigate back in Whitebridge. The body of unemployed tabloid journalist Terry Lewis turns up in an alley. Monika’s team is temporarily assigned to the grotesquely misnamed DCI Wellbeloved, who immediately tries to divide and conquer. He suggests to DI Colin Beresford that DC Jack Crane will soon snatch his job and tells DS Kate Meadows that she has the spark Beresford lacks. Naturally, they want Monika back ASAP. But will a solution to Lewis’ murder while Monika languishes behind the gates of Stamford Hall help their old boss, or will it just cement Wellbeloved’s position as their new leader?
It’s high time for Baxter to patch things up with Paniatowski, before their continuing feud overshadows Spencer’s deft plotting.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8408-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
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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