Sharp pays meticulous attention to detail, but this novella reads as though the author’s grown weary of her own heroine's...
Close protection specialist Charlie Fox finds herself south of the border in a country devastated by a massive earthquake in Sharp’s latest (Die Easy, 2012, etc.).
While working to unmask the killer of a man sent as personal protection for an earthquake Rescue and Recovery team, Charlie meets a colorful cast of suspicious characters: a quirky Australian pilot named Riley; burly Joe Marcus, who served 20 years in the Marine Corps; Wilson, a Scot and former paratrooper; and a young girl, Hope Tyler, whose best friend is a yellow Lab with a talent for finding anything, including human beings, both dead and alive. One of the sponsors of the program isn’t satisfied with the explanations she received about how the man who once had Charlie’s job died and contracts with Charlie’s boss, Parker Armstrong, to determine the true nature of his death. She also wants to know whether or not the team she supports is on the up-and-up. Charlie, tough as gristle and relentlessly determined, ends up with some odd duties for a protection specialist—working orthodontic and forensic pathology in connection with the victims. But the real mystery is why the former protection agent was killed and who killed him. With a plot that encompasses everything from missing jewels to Hope’s true purpose, Sharp’s story is thin and not terribly satisfying. Charlie is her usual tough-talking, butt-kicking self, but this foray into the field—while displaying the author’s admirable adherence to fact and impressive research—feels both short and rushed, like a movie that’s just getting going when “The End” pops up. Readers may find the quasi-rape scene between Charlie and her former lover, Sean—it starts with him jumping her in a shower and ends with her forcing him to have sex—disturbing even though Sharp tries very hard to justify it.
Sharp pays meticulous attention to detail, but this novella reads as though the author’s grown weary of her own heroine's adventures.Pub Date: July 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63194-081-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
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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