Sharp delivers another solid entry in a series that consistently delivers a world-weary heroine who can outdo any man who...
Sharp’s latest entry in her Charlie Fox series has her gritty heroine making a Die Hard-inspired stand in the Big Easy.
Charlie Fox, a woman in the male-dominated profession of personal protection, has more than the rich man she’s guarding to worry about on this assignment: Her former lover, Sean, is back on his feet following a near-fatal shooting and is working for the first time in months. But he’s not the same Sean she once knew. In fact, his memory of their former relationship has been wiped clean, and he’s keeping Charlie firmly at arm’s length. When Charlie and Sean sign on to guard Blake Dyer, a millionaire attending a special weekend of fundraising for Katrina victims, they end up with more than they bargained for, including Dyer’s refusal to pack it all in and go home following two violent assaults. Meanwhile, one of Charlie’s old foes turns up in the form of Vic Morton, a fellow bodyguard who trained with her when she was in school back in England. Morton is no friend to Charlie, though, since he was one of the four men whose rape of her led to her dismissal from training. When Morton shows up to guard Blake’s godson and the offspring of another millionaire, Charlie discovers he’s filling Sean’s head full of lies and now must combat not only her former lover’s suspicions that she’s his enemy, but also prove in the process that’s she’s competent to partner with him on assignment. That Charlie is tough is never open to question; sometimes Sharp plays her a little too macho to be engaging. But in the end, the movie parallel will strike the right note with fans of nonstop action/adventure, despite the author’s tendency to overexplain the mechanics of the protagonists’ professional choices to readers in it more for the thrill than the education.
Sharp delivers another solid entry in a series that consistently delivers a world-weary heroine who can outdo any man who crosses her path.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60598-400-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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