A solid second round of capers featuring this attractive, cynical couple.
In this second installment of the License to Lie mystery series, con artist Roxy Tanner and criminologist Skip Cosgrove contend with a scam gone wrong, death threats and their evolving romance.
At a Hollywood party and looking fabulous, Roxy Tanner is there to lure obnoxious financier Jack Welton back to his hideaway apartment. She was hired by Anita, his scorned mistress, to exact revenge. At the apartment, Roxy stuns Welton with her Taser and hacks into his computer to gain access to his illegal bank account. Anita and her brother Dom arrive to help, but Roxy leaves in haste upon learning that criminologist Skip Cosgrove—with whom she’s having a hot, if wary, affair—is in the hospital. Turns out, he was attacked by drug-world criminal Joey Santino, whom he recently testified against. Skip senses Roxy has been up to trouble and that she will want to help track Santino, so he sends her on a busywork mission to scope out a house formerly connected to the criminal. Roxy stumbles onto fresh leads, however, thanks to tips from Lily, a 12-year-old street kid. While Roxy and Lily bond and follow various trails, Skip discovers Welton is dead, and he goes on the hunt to find the killer and protect Roxy. The lovers eventually have their reunion at the home of Anita’s wise aunt Marjorie, which precedes a final sequence that resolves the crosscutting mystery plots. Author of several previous mysteries, including License to Lie (2014), which launched Roxy and Skip, Ambrose touches on high-finance malfeasance, adultery and drug dealing with the kind of snark that will remind readers of Elmore Leonard. Given their moral nuances, Roxy and Skip are entertaining anchors for a series, and the introduction of Lily brings the promise of further complications for their relationship. Yet Ambrose’s rather noir/pulp-fiction explosion of characters, settings and plot details can at times be clichéd as well as confusing, with the mysteries ultimately not as intriguing as his sleuthing protagonists. Still, the narrative moves smoothly enough, and readers will look forward to the duo’s future adventures.
A solid second round of capers featuring this attractive, cynical couple.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0985954048
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Satori
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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