Nonstop action and an intricate plot weave together to create another thrill ride for fans of Sharp's heroine—though the...
Charlotte "Charlie" Fox (Absence of Light, 2016, etc.), a tough-as-beef-jerky former British soldier who works private security, travels to Iraq to find her former lover in Sharp’s latest meticulously detailed adventure.
Charlie left the military in disgrace following her rape at the hands of four of her former squad-mates, but she wasn’t the only one affected by the incident. Another Special Forces solider, Sean Meyer, also lost his career due to the blowback and eventually became Charlie’s lover. Sean formed Armstrong-Meyer, a successful security partnership with Parker Armstrong, and Charlie also went to work there. Following a shooting, Sean and Charlie split, and as this book opens, Parker has dispatched her to Iraq, where Sean's gone missing, to try to track him down and determine whether or not he killed Michael Clay, one of the men who raped Charlie. While looking into Clay’s death, Charlie meets another former soldier named Luisa Dawson, who sets off with Charlie to piece together what happened to Clay and why. Dawson, another woman in a heavily male profession, and Charlie are soon abducted and warned off the investigation by a group of brutal and heavily armed Russians who won’t tell the women why they’re interested in Clay’s death or why they want them gone. Soon, Charlie and Dawson are on a convoluted trail involving a ghost from Charlie’s past and some missing artifacts. Charlie is no girly-girl; she’s tough, driven, and very, very deadly. Sharp’s series featuring the troubled and violent Charlie stands out for its knowledgeable and convincing situations and well-crafted action sequences. When Charlie talks tactics, weapons, or reconnaissance, it rings true. Sharp writes her as emotionally disillusioned and vulnerable but never helpless. Charlie’s more likely to do the rescuing than be bailed out herself.
Nonstop action and an intricate plot weave together to create another thrill ride for fans of Sharp's heroine—though the book is heavily dependent on back story that readers of her previous adventures will find easier to follow.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-438-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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