Respect is owed to French for making her interrogation scenes good enough to really spike your blood pressure, but the magic...
A sheltered young woman comes out of her cocoon—and her transformation ends with murder.
In the sixth Dublin Murder Squad novel, the unfolding of a murder case is seen through the eyes of Detective Antoinette Conway, a character we got to know first through her now-partner, Steve Moran, in The Secret Place (2014). But while her mysteriously hard-to-crack exterior was compelling from Moran's perspective, her internal monologue proves less so. Here, she comes across as much younger and less in control. And Moran and his goofy smile are just along for the ride as Conway heads up an investigation of the murder of 26-year-old Aislinn Murray, found dead in her meticulous home from a punch to the face and a smack on the fireplace hearth. It starts off looking like a regular lovers' tiff when the victim's texts reveal she had a date scheduled for that night with Rory Fallon, a smitten, daydreaming kind of guy. Conway thinks he should be easy to crack, but he swears it was someone else—Aislinn had a way about her that really made men obsessed. But she wasn't always that way, as her friend Lucy reveals. Her transformation into a heartbreaker was new, and it had purpose. As the two detectives start looking at other options—"Lover Boy is changing, in my mind"—the investigation is impeded by their own murder squad. But why? It's not just because the guys think Conway has a stick up you know where.
Respect is owed to French for making her interrogation scenes good enough to really spike your blood pressure, but the magic of previous installments is missing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02633-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Like her cast, James gets in a little more drama for a lively continuation of her series.
An impossible actor’s career ends when he dies midperformance, leaving a cast and crew who would have been all too willing to have done the deed.
Charlie Harris and his feline sidekicks, Maine coon Diesel and kitten Ramses, are all excited that Charlie’s daughter, Laura, and her husband, Frank, will be headlining Athena College’s spring production as lead actress and director in a homegrown new play, Careless Whispers. Laura was excited too until the male lead, who had to bail suddenly, is replaced by someone she knows all too well: Luke Lombardi. Laura’s had run-ins with Luke in the past and knows that he’s a drama queen in all the wrong ways. When Luke shows up in Mississippi, Charlie and his partner, Helen Louise Brady, are suitably unimpressed with his imperious attitude and clueless mini-entourage, but both figure there’s little to worry about until a string of pranks seems to escalate to Luke’s onstage murder. Though Charlie is concerned that Laura’s dislike of Luke might point to her as a suspect, c’mon! Chief Deputy Kanesha Berry, whom Charlie’s earlier investigations (The Pawful Truth, 2019, etc.) have made something of a family friend, doesn’t think Laura is guilty either, though she does have to follow procedure and question anyone with means and motive. While there aren’t many folks in the means category, Luke’s volatile and narcissistic manner has heaped the motive category with suspects—and can anyone blame them? It may all come down to unraveling the mystery behind the identity of the playwright, Finnegan Zwake, a pseudonym no one had thought to question until Charlie decides he can’t help but, once again, get involved.
Like her cast, James gets in a little more drama for a lively continuation of her series.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49115-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Save a friendship, save a life—a surprising lesson for an unusual and absorbing thriller.
A woman reunited with an estranged friend discovers that nothing about her has changed in 12 years—including the ages of her children—and can’t rest until she solves the mystery.
Beth Leeson has always wondered what happened to Flora Braid after their friendship fell apart. But the Braids moved away, and they lost touch. Twelve years later, Beth decides to check on her and spies Flora coaxing her two small children, Thomas and Emily, ages 5 and 3, out of their car—which is crazy, because that’s how old the kids were when Beth knew them. By now they should be teenagers. And the Braids’ youngest child, Georgina, isn't there at all. Beth isn’t crazy. She knows what she saw. Her daughter, Zannah, serves as a precocious sounding board for her evolving, and sometimes outlandish, theories: “Even if a science genius invented a drug that stopped people aging, they wouldn’t freeze their kids in time at three and five. Those are pain-in-the-arse ages. You might freeze your kids at, like, nine and eleven,” Zannah says to refute the idea that Thomas and Emily were part of a genetic experiment. But the simplest explanation they can think of—that the children are Thomas and Emily’s younger siblings—doesn’t quite add up. Why would Flora give all her children the same names? The question then becomes, how well did Beth really know the Braids? With a combination of social media stalking and amateur detective work, Beth tracks down Flora and her husband, Lewis, in both England and Florida and discovers that her old friends are leading double lives in more ways than one. Initially, the bond between the two women seems too weak to warrant such an intense search, but as Beth considers the problems that Flora might’ve been dealing with years ago that she hadn’t noticed, her curiosity thaws into genuine concern that turns her mission into a moral imperative.
Save a friendship, save a life—a surprising lesson for an unusual and absorbing thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297820-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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