by Sara Paretsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2012
Plotted with all Paretsky’s customary generosity, this standout entry harnesses her heroine’s righteous anger to some richly...
V.I. Warshawski’s 14th case entangles everyone in Chicago from a murdered private eye to a pair of Senate candidates and the world’s 21st-richest man.
Little do the seven tween girls invoking the spirit of that famous fictional vampire Carmilla, Queen of the Night, at a secret ceremony in Mount Moriah Cemetery know that only a few yards away lies the fresh corpse of one Miles Wuchnik, very recently added to the rolls of the dead. V.I., leaving a high-rolling party for right-wing media darling Wade Lawlor to respond to her cousin Petra’s plea to find Kira Dudek, one of the tweens, wakes up the next morning to learn that although she succeeded in getting the girls away from the murder scene before the police arrived, Lawlor and all his dittoheads are implicating her in the murder of the colleague she never met. It’s entirely plausible that V.I. might be taking money from billionaire Chaim Salanter to protect his granddaughter Arielle Zitter, another of the tweens. And since Salanter is a prominent contributor to the senatorial campaign of University of Illinois president Sophy Durango, it figures that Lawlor, a big booster of Sophy’s opponent, creationist Helen Kendrick, would go after both Salanter and V.I. But the sad fact is that Salanter hasn’t hired Warshawski (Body Work, 2010, etc.); in fact, he meets with her repeatedly only to warn her to stay off the case. Not that she’s not distracted all on her own, since her old law school friend, bipolar attorney Leydon Ashford, has just been thrown from a height at Rockefeller Chapel and lies near death. Leydon’s last cryptic message—“I saw him on the catafalque”—seems to connect the attack on her to Wuchnik’s murder. Can V.I. put together the pieces in time to save the young witnesses from the killer?
Plotted with all Paretsky’s customary generosity, this standout entry harnesses her heroine’s righteous anger to some richly deserving targets, all linked together in a truly amazing finale.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15783-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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 Lorna Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.
Too much free time leads a New Hampshire bookseller into yet another case of murder.
Now that Tricia Miles has Pixie Poe and Mr. Everett practically running her bookstore, Haven’t Got a Clue, she finds herself at loose ends. Her wealthy sister, Angelica, who in the guise of Nigela Ricita has invested heavily in making Stoneham a bookish tourist attraction, is entering the amateur competition for the Great Booktown Bake-Off. So Tricia, who’s recently taken up baking as a hobby, decides to join her and spends a lot of time looking for the perfect cupcake recipe. A visit to another bookstore leaves Tricia witnessing a nasty argument between owner Joyce Widman and next-door neighbor Vera Olson over the trimming of tree branches that hang over Joyce’s yard—also overheard by new town police officer Cindy Pearson. After Tricia accepts Joyce’s offer of some produce from her garden, they find Vera skewered by a pitchfork, and when Police Chief Grant Baker arrives, Joyce is his obvious suspect. Ever since Tricia moved to Stoneham, the homicide rate has skyrocketed (Poisoned Pages, 2018, etc.), and her history with Baker is fraught. She’s also become suspicious about the activities at Pets-A-Plenty, the animal shelter where Vera was a dedicated volunteer. Tricia’s offered her expertise to the board, but president Toby Kingston has been less than welcoming. With nothing but baking on her calendar, Tricia has plenty of time to investigate both the murder and her vague suspicions about the shelter. Plenty of small-town friendships and rivalries emerge in her quest for the truth.
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0272-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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