A worthy follow-up in the long, enjoyable series of McKenna mysteries.
In Borg’s (Tahoe Trap, 2012) latest thriller, Owen McKenna is back in action trying to solve the murder of an elderly woman.
Joe Rorvik was once a world-famous ski racing champion, even capturing the gold medal for the United States at the Winter Olympics. Now well into old age, he lives in a beautiful mountainside home near Lake Tahoe in Nevada. The bliss of Joe’s golden years is suddenly destroyed in an afternoon when his wife, Cynthia, falls off their porch and winds up in a serious, likely fatal coma. The police think it’s an accident, but Joe knows better: Someone tried to murder her. Trouble is, he doesn’t know who did it, and he doesn’t know why. That’s when he turns to detective Owen McKenna and his Great Dane, Spot, to uncover the truth about his beloved wife’s demise. Before long, Cynthia’s friends start turning up dead, too—also from curious “accidents.” McKenna soon finds that all the victims have a common thread: They oppose the development of a new, expensive ski resort right in their backyards. While McKenna scrambles to find the killer and bring some peace to Joe and the other victims, he discovers that Cynthia has one remaining friend, Simone Bonnaire. Though Simone lives in constant fear of her abusive boyfriend, she’s yet to take a stance on the ski resort. Thinking he’s helping her escape, McKenna convinces Simone to take a grueling ski trip through the desolate wilderness, only to realize he’s put her squarely in the path of the murderer, and he has no way to warn her. From that point forward, the chase is on. This is the 11th installment of the Owen McKenna thriller series, so at this stage, Borg has solid command of his character and a fully realized sense of his personality, which readers will enjoy. The landscape is also beautifully crafted, perhaps leading readers to feel like they’re curled by the fire as the snow comes down. The prose can be clunky at times, though, with bits of cliché—“Cynthia’s heart beat so bad that it hurt”—but the pace builds nicely and doesn’t let up once it gathers steam.
A worthy follow-up in the long, enjoyable series of McKenna mysteries.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1931296212
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Thriller Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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