By playing down Lily Dale’s residents, Staub misses an opportunity to flesh out more of Bella’s everyday life (Nine Lives,...
Turning an upstate New York bed-and-breakfast into a destination-wedding spot is made even harder by a troublesome bride whose life may be in danger.
Young widow Bella Jordan is just getting the hang of running the Valley View Guesthouse in the little town of Lily Dale when her friend and neighbor Odelia suggests the two get into the wedding business. Odelia’s granddaughter has a friend who’s looking for an out-of-the-way place for her upcoming nuptials, and Lily Dale fits the bill. Never mind that Lily Dale is also a spiritualist hub, with many residents claiming to have a connection to the psychic world. The bride, Johneen Maynard, is more focused on the flowers than the town’s history. Her fiance, Parker Langley, is marginally more personable, though when the two descend on Lily Dale, they threaten to overwhelm the normally calm Bella and her young son, Max. Having supplied the idea, Odelia leaves Bella on her own when it comes to the execution. Well, perhaps not completely on her own: she has the help of local veterinarian Drew Bailey. Although Drew, with whom Bella is only recently on a first-name basis, is helpful when it comes to Bella’s cat, Chance, and her many kittens, Bella isn’t sure that he can do much to alleviate wedding stress. And although Odelia means to help, the only concrete step she takes is to antagonize the bride when she delivers a message from the spirit world that Johneen may be in danger. Matters are only made worse with a surprise visit from Bella’s mother-in- law, who’s determined to drag Bella and Max off to Chicago.
By playing down Lily Dale’s residents, Staub misses an opportunity to flesh out more of Bella’s everyday life (Nine Lives, 2015). But the introduction of more ongoing characters is a rousing success.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62953-772-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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