A bit lightweight as a thriller, but the family drama and an indelible protagonist give the narrative a decent amount of...
In Patrick’s debut thriller, a small-town Texas lawyer may be getting too close to finding the killer who murdered her client’s husband.
When Texas Rangers arrest Sarah Baines for murdering her philandering husband, she’s already got a lawyer: Taylour Dixxon, a woman Sarah recently befriended who now has her first murder case. After Sarah is assaulted in prison while being tried, authorities place her in protective custody. That doesn’t stop her husband’s killer, Roman Danshov, from looking for Sarah—and Taylour might be the way for Roman to find her. Patrick’s novel features a protagonist whose life outside of lawyering is often more intriguing: Taylour’s wayward nephew, Spencer, invites himself to live with her, and the boy’s father doesn’t seem to mind; and other legal cases not relevant to the murder, such as homeowners in a dispute over a new fence and an Internet hookup gone wrong, leave more lasting impressions. Taylour is commendable as the lead, and she’s usually thrown into dramatic situations, as when she quickly earns Spencer’s respect by putting him to work or when she gradually falls for Philip Davidson, the Ranger keeping a close eye on Sarah—a connection that adds tension since Sarah also has feelings for her protector. Roman’s villainy is never in question; he’s determined to stop Sarah (for a reason not wholly revealed until the end), and his resolve leaves bodies in his wake and pages wrought with suspense. But he’s inexplicably omniscient, somehow knowing that Sarah is in protective custody and that, despite the case being over, Taylour is still looking into the murder. Similarly, for a hired gun not wanting to draw attention to himself, Roman is too conspicuous: He pulls his .22 on an annoying cabbie and is continually flashing wads of cash, even for something as simple as a clerk helping him find clothes to buy. Though the murderer’s identity is known from the beginning, Patrick throws in a surprise or two before the story’s over, and aside from a minor character whose fate remains uncertain, everything wraps up nicely.
A bit lightweight as a thriller, but the family drama and an indelible protagonist give the narrative a decent amount of depth.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1493601394
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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