The Author’s Note and corresponding Pinterest board show Whittle’s painstaking commitment to the details of her heroine’s...
Partners in work and life investigate the Hollywood crew that’s come to town.
When he’s first approached to reopen the Jessica Talbot murder, a cold case from years before, Trey Seaver isn’t having it. He’s certain former producer Nick Talbot killed his wife even though Nick ended up going free. Although Trey was the second to respond to the crime scene, his police days are far behind, and he has no interest in dredging up the past. But a threat on Nick’s life has made Trey a potential suspect, and he’s obligated if not blackmailed to look into the case with the help of Tai Randolph, his partner in all things (Reckoning and Ruin, 2016, etc.). Tai knows Trey to be an excellent reader of people, a human lie detector, and when Nick pleads his case as an innocent man, Trey believes him and agrees to do whatever it takes to clear his name. Tai and Trey attempt to go undercover on the local Atlanta set of Moonshine, which Nick’s working on along with writer Addison Canright, with whom Nick was cheating on Jessica and to whom he’s now engaged. Nick’s relationship with Addison is made even more complicated by his psychiatric history, which has led her to seek full conservatorship over him. Though Tai and Trey’s undercover work is an ill-kept secret, the two get plenty of interested parties to spill their guts in hopes of disclosing the truth. Surrounded by a set of trained actors, Trey’s difficulty in fingering the liar among the bunch makes him fear that his superpower may be dwindling. And Tai, who seems to think she’s the archetypal spirited Southern girl with a few tricks up her sleeve, doesn’t display the wit and verve that would make her a more appealing protagonist.
The Author’s Note and corresponding Pinterest board show Whittle’s painstaking commitment to the details of her heroine’s expensive La Perla lingerie and her hero’s Ferrari in an adventure aimed at those with similar aspirations.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0983-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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