Thrilling, with a perfect mix of brains and bravado.
In his sixth Johnny Donohue Adventure, Mason (Havana Moon, 2012, etc.) sends his sleuth after a treasure supposedly lost in the wake of World War II.
Software entrepreneur Johnny and his easygoing girlfriend, Carmen, are enjoying Florida’s summer waters in his Catalina sailboat. Upon docking, Johnny receives a phone message from Jane Haggerty, his former love in Long Island: her father has died. Johnny travels back home to Westhampton Beach for the funeral of Willie Haggerty, a brilliant mathematician/physicist who worked with Alan Turing to break the codes of Germany’s Enigma Machine during WWII. Johnny’s friend and ex-cop Lonnie Turner tells him that Turing supposedly hid bars of Nazi silver in the woods near Bletchley Park. Eventually, Johnny also learns that Willie was in perfect health (for an 88-year-old) and was found dead inside his Mercedes-Benz, which he’d brought home from the war. Meanwhile, Jane’s new boyfriend, investment banker Mason Goodwyn, rubs Johnny the wrong way. Lonnie discovers his criminal past involving the IRS and SEC—as well as a dead business associate. Willie’s grandson, Jason, later informs Johnny that the mathematician somehow paid Jason’s law school tab and set him up living in New York. Perhaps those silver bars aren’t as lost as everyone thinks….Whether you’ve read all or none of these nautical mysteries, Mason presents his laid-back tough guy with breezy panache that requires little catch-up. There’s a hint of wistfulness, though, as Johnny remembers growing up with Jane; their childhood was “way too brief like a flat stone skipping across the bay and disappearing just below the surface of the water.” Generally, Johnny’s narration is quip-filled, including welcome notes of self-deprecation: “strange situations...seem to drop into my life like bad movies from the nineteen forties.” Readers also learn about Alan Turing’s tragic life, his fascinating code-decryption methods, and the beginnings of the modern computer. Willie’s later work to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons provides noble commentary to this pivotal Johnny Donohue adventure.
Thrilling, with a perfect mix of brains and bravado.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5085-2467-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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