Isaacs’ wit and wisecracks can’t save this one.
A former FBI agent, planning to settle down and be a normal person on Long Island, smells a rat at her weekly lunch group.
When she met widowed hunk Josh, a top lawyer–turned–federal judge, and his now-14-year-old daughter, Eliza, Corie Geller thought she knew what she wanted. Instead of flying around the world interrogating terrorists for the government, she would marry Josh, become a wife and mother, and use her language skills to vet books in Arabic for U.S. publishers. That's how she landed at La Cuisine Délicieuse in Shorehaven, Long Island, lunching every Wednesday with the suburban self-employed. A landscaper, an eBay reseller, a low-end speechwriter, a photo retoucher, an internet data expert…but there’s one guy in the group who sets off her internal alarms. Pete Delaney sits in the same chair every week, won’t take his eyes off his car, keeps changing phones—it’s just weird. Even if he does check out to be what he claims to be—a freelance packaging designer—his many three-day out-of-town trips don’t quite make sense. So she and her dad, who's retired NYPD, launch a sub-rosa investigation. Following up every hunch, lead, and inkling she has about this guy is a full-time job. A full-time job for the reader, too. While the investigation goes on and on, often straining credibility, other possible plotlines in the book suffer. Josh’s dead wife, whose stuff is still all over the house. The daughter, whom Corie supposedly loves to pieces but who barely speaks a line of dialogue. The ex-boyfriend she still has the hots for. The boring husband she’s not so sure about. These characters and storylines are sketched in but languish as the Delaney investigation inexorably proceeds in excruciating detail. Still, Isaacs (A Hint of Strangeness, 2015, etc.) never forgets the need to charm the reader. Corie keeps up the nonstop sarcastic patter, and she really is a hoot. Her in-laws’ house: “they bought it from Mrs. Havisham then added indoor plumbing.” Pete Delaney’s pants: “strictly old-guy—the baggy kind that make men look as if penises hadn’t yet been invented.”
Isaacs’ wit and wisecracks can’t save this one.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4755-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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