Readers new to Tai’s adventures (Deeper than the Grave, 2014, etc.) may be put off by all the back story. Those enamored of...
Headstrong and determined, a woman trying to leave her past behind is forced back to her Savannah home to confront her biggest adversaries: her family.
Glad to escape her past, Tai Randolph is hoping life will calm down now that she’s settled in Atlanta and focused on managing a niche gun shop. She and boyfriend Trey are celebrating a year together—a big commitment for either to make given their fiercely independent personalities. Both dread the upcoming trial of Tai’s no-good cousin, Jasper, and their apprehension increases when Trey is called into the office by Marisa, his boss at a private security firm. Upset by a meeting she sees on Trey’s calendar with Jasper's new attorney's investigator, she gets even more upset when she hears Tai and Trey’s bad news: apparently, Jasper has found a way to sue both of them for millions while awaiting his own trial. Angry, Tai tries to learn more about Ainsworth Lovett, Jasper’s lawyer. What kind of scruples does Ainsworth have if he’s willing to defend a man who makes KKK members look like moderates? In spite of wanting to defend herself, Tai has a much bigger problem when her ex’s current love, Hope, turns up in the gun store shockingly seeking Tai’s help. Because Hope’s testifying against Jasper, Tai feels that she must help her even though it means a return to her relatives and her Savannah past. All her digging doesn’t uncover the secret her Uncle Boone has been hiding, which supplies a final twist that sets up the next in the series .
Readers new to Tai’s adventures (Deeper than the Grave, 2014, etc.) may be put off by all the back story. Those enamored of her will enjoy the way it drives the plot, which is most likely to appeal to those with a strong investment in the heroine.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0549-1
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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