by Sarah Andrews ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2002
Andrews, a geology instructor at Sonoma State University, offers excellent tutelage on debris flow, fault scarps, seismic...
Unemployed forensic geologist Em Hansen (An Eye for Gold, 2000, etc.) is stewing in her Salt Lake City bedsit about the whereabouts of her devout Mormon boyfriend Ray when her best chum, trust-fund baby Faye Carter, calls and wails she needs her. Faye’s pregnant, her FBI lover Tom Latimer is discombobulated about it, and the TV blaring to distract them cuts off state geologist Sidney Smeeth midsentence as she’s pointing at the site of the upcoming winter Olympics, the Town Center stadium, unwisely built directly over the Wasatch Fault, which has just rumbled to a 5.2 on the Richter Scale. Smeeth is soon murdered; so is a science reporter covering her death; and Em’s stuck mopping up Faye’s morning sickness, offering her romantic counseling, ducking the barbs of Ray’s nasty, hyperambitious sister Katie, and looking over survey plans for Tom and the FBI, trying to find something amiss. Katie’s husband Enos and his boss, developer Micah Hayes, are covering up stadium welding defects—and worse—and if Em weren’t so worried about Ray’s continued absence, she’d realize her geological expertise, new earth-scientist friendships, and unsubtle snooping have put her in danger despite the best efforts of FBI field agent Jack Sampler to protect her. When Ray finally pops by, his cop instincts are overwhelmed by the collision of Katie, Enos, Em, and his mom.
Andrews, a geology instructor at Sonoma State University, offers excellent tutelage on debris flow, fault scarps, seismic retrofits, crust slippage, and geologic hazards. Now if she could just get Em to lighten up, she might find a boyfriend worthy of her.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-25350-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 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
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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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