The second in LoTempio’s series (Purr M for Murder, 2017) reprises her signature blend of cozy and cats in a mild mix sure...
When a disastrous event promoting the local animal shelter leaves an employee as a potential murder suspect, her colleagues and friends rally to clear her name.
Returning to her hometown of Deer Park, North Carolina, wasn’t in Syd McCall’s plan for her life, but it’s suiting her—and Toby, her recently adopted tabby—just fine. She and her nearby sister, Kat, run the Friendly Paws Animal Shelter along with their friend Maggie Shayne, who works with the sisters to make sure all their cats and dogs have safe and loving homes. Their newest promotion, cleverly dubbed Caturday, pairs a book signing with bestselling author and Deer Park native Dudley Simmons with a social adoption event for the shelter. All systems are go until Dudley has an accident that prevents his attendance. Luckily, last-minute guest Ulla Townsend, the hostess of a television shopping show, agrees to fill in. Another Deer Park native, Ulla hasn’t been embraced by her former town the way Dudley has. In fact, when Maggie learns about the new guest, she uncharacteristically refuses to take part in the event. Once Syd meets Ulla, she understands Maggie’s reluctance. Since Caturday is meant to be a one-off, it shouldn’t matter much, but Ulla has what seems like a panic attack. Before Syd even realizes what’s happening, the surprise guest is being led away on a stretcher. Ulla, who doesn’t even make it to the hospital, has evidently been the victim of foul play. What’s worse, Maggie, who’s known to loathe Ulla, becomes a top suspect in her murder. To clear Maggie’s name, Syd has to rely on her boyfriend, homicide detective Will Worthington, as well as her own instincts to pluck the murderer from a sea of enemies.
The second in LoTempio’s series (Purr M for Murder, 2017) reprises her signature blend of cozy and cats in a mild mix sure to please fans of the subgenre.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-487-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
