Readers new to the series are advised to save their sympathy for the peripatetic hero and his immediate family since most...
Archaeologist Chuck Bender’s contract for preservation work in Utah’s Arches National Park is disrupted by a sudden death that turns out to be only the first of several.
Whatever provoked Megan Johnson to ignore all the park rules and venture onto the Landscape Arch, one of many striking, naturally formed sandstone structures that give the park its name, payback was swift and unforgiving: The arch collapsed under her, plunging her five stories to her death. A regrettable accident, says chief ranger Sanford Gibbons. Not a bit, insists hotheaded Chuck (Yosemite Fall, 2018, etc.). First he blames George Epson, the regional manager of O&G Seismic, for the petrochemical blasting he thinks caused the arch to collapse; then, when he finds a neat hole bored in the base of the arch with telltale signs of an explosive packed into it, he insists that it was deliberate murder—and that Gibbons, who maintains that he examined the remnants of the arch itself without finding anything suspicious, is covering it up. Chuck’s knack of antagonizing would-be allies isn’t limited to the death of Megan Johnson. He constantly crosses swords with his wife, Durango paramedic Janelle Ortega, over how best to handle her newly rebellious 13-year-old daughter, Carmelita; with Carmelita herself, who’s got quite the mouth on her; and with his hippy-dippy mother, Sheila Bender, who neglected him during the years he was fighting to grow up but wants back into his life now that she’s hung out a shingle as a seer in nearby Moab. Almost everyone in the case, from a pair of retired couples visiting the park to a homeless man who’s taken up residence there, Chuck gradually realizes, is connected to his mother. Where will it all end?
Readers new to the series are advised to save their sympathy for the peripatetic hero and his immediate family since most members of the noncontinuing cast are bound for either the slammer or the morgue.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948814-05-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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