The ambitious serial-robbery scheme is mainly a pretext for an endless series of chases involving cats, people, or cats and...
Talking cats once again run rings around their human detective counterparts in this latest return to Molina Point, California.
As if he’d just been waiting for his cancer-stricken mother to die, Nevin Luther has followed his brothers, Varney and DeWayne, in abandoning his father, recently widowed farmer Zebulon Luther. His son is no great loss, Zeb reflects ruefully; the heartbreak is that Nevin and his wife, Thelma, have taken their 12-year-old daughter, Mindy, who really loved the old man and wanted to stay with him. No one can feel the depth of Zeb’s loss like sleuthing tomcat Joe Grey, whose own daughter, Courtney, is kidnapped (catnapped?) from a street a few blocks away from the spot where Joe had found an unidentified woman beaten and half-buried. After Joe, taking advantage of his speaking and dialing abilities, phones in his discovery to 911, Police Chief Max Harper and his force assume that both Maurita, the victim of the beach attack, and a suspiciously gloved library patron Joe Grey alertly spotted are connected to a daring rash of robberies whose most recent victim is restaurateur Jon Jaarel. But how long will they take to realize that Nevin Luther’s bank balance has reached over $1 million? And how can they possibly find time in the middle of such a crime wave to search for Courtney? Never fear: As usual in this venerable series (Cat Shining Bright, 2017, etc.), the well-meaning human professionals are utterly outclassed by Joe Grey and his feline cohort, the most activist and competent among the current bevy of fictional detecting cats.
The ambitious serial-robbery scheme is mainly a pretext for an endless series of chases involving cats, people, or cats and people, climaxing in some teary-eyed reflections on the power of love involving—well, you know who.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283804-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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