One MacGuffin after another, with grisly sidelights now and then—exactly what fans have come to expect from hyperactive...
The ear looked just like Chip’s even if it wasn’t attached to his head anymore, said Gracellen, and it came attached to a note demanding $30,000 for the return of the rest of him alive.
Naturally Stella can’t refuse her sister’s request to rescue the boy. But when she tracks him down, he and his love, Natalya, a mail-order bride from Russia, are hacking away at her husband’s body and putting the pieces into several garbage bags for disposal in trash containers around town. No, they insist, they didn’t kill him, even if they did want him out of the way so they could marry. Somehow, Benton Parch just arrived dead on their porch, and they felt obligated to get rid of him. And no wonder, since the plastic surgeon trainee the tightwad had paid to do work on Natalya had botched the job royally: Just look at her. The lovers have no idea who might actually have killed him, but they think his former business partner may have had a grievance. Meanwhile, drug dealers are after Natalya’s son Luka for late payments, which they’ve been trying to cover with that ear package and request for money from Gracellen, who supposedly could have gotten funds from Chip’s wealthy grandfather, who even though he didn’t talk to him, probably would have come up with the cash, it being family and all. Complicating matters, a stowaway in Stella’s car looks enough like Luka to be mistaken for him, and Stella’s two suitors, Goat the sheriff and BJ of the mushy kisses, are drawn in to help her out, even though Stella has enough strong-arm skills of her own to subdue wife abusers, a task she’s taken seriously since disposing of her vile husband Ollie.
One MacGuffin after another, with grisly sidelights now and then—exactly what fans have come to expect from hyperactive Littlefield (A Bad Day for Scandal, 2011, etc.).Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64838-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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