Baker (The Gilly Salt Sisters, 2012, etc.) has managed to carve out her own niche in this rocky North Woods terrain, largely...
A tiny New Hampshire river town, whose main industry is a paper mill, is rocked by a tragic accident.
By the mid-1990s, small American manufacturing operations are already losing ground, and jobs, to foreign competitors. However, Titan Falls, teetering on the steep banks of the polluted Androscoggin River, is still dependent on the Titan Mill, which converts lumber into paper and has been owned since time immemorial by the McAllister family. The mill employs most of the men, and June, spouse of the mill’s current scion, Cal McAllister, rules the wives—membership in her knitting circle is de rigueur. The orphaned, nomadic Snow children, Zeke and his fey sisters, Mercy and Hannah, have arrived in a rickety RV to claim the plot of land vacated by their late father, Pruitt. Hannah senses that the ghost of ancestor Gert Snow, a recluse who died under suspicious circumstances, hovers nearby, making mischief. Gert’s worst intervention is the event that launches the main plot—on the night before Thanksgiving, a church youth-group bus skids off a cliff while rounding an icy hairpin turn. Nate, June and Cal’s teenage son, and other passengers sustain only minor injuries, but Nate’s childhood best friend and secret love, Suzie, is killed. The bus driver, Fergus, husband of local sheepherder Hazel, hovers, comatose, on life support. (The skeletal remains of Gert are ominously recovered during the crash investigation.) The accident is pinned on Zeke, whose battered pickup is found nearby, crumpled against a tree. But what was one of Suzie’s bright red mittens, knitted from Hazel’s artisanal dyed yarn, doing in Cal’s pocket, June wonders. From such minutiae, Baker crafts her appealing, occasionally cloying mélange of magic realism, mystery and social commentary.
Baker (The Gilly Salt Sisters, 2012, etc.) has managed to carve out her own niche in this rocky North Woods terrain, largely due to her deeply flawed but likable characters.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1273-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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