An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.
In Diamond’s thriller, a guarded woman slowly opens herself to new possibilities as she deals with a conspiracy.
Thirty-two-year-old Claire Chastain is in a time of transition, which is causing her to run from commitment. Specifically, she’s run away from live-in boyfriend Peter,who made the mistake of thinking about proposing to her. She leaves her high-powered finance job in New York City and returns home to Washington, D.C., where she takes an accounting position for which she’s overqualified. She ostensibly came back to help her cantankerous grandmother Leonamove into an assisted living facility, but Claire’s new life becomes unduly complicated. For one, she’s being followed by a huge man in a 1971 Lincoln Continental. Then she learns that her paranoid friend Gavin was killed in a strange car accident. Finally, at work, Claire receives an odd spreadsheet, apparently as part of an audit of a pharmaceutical company. She soon finds herself being hunted by shadowy forces—and aided by a most unusual guardian angel. Initially, Diamond, the author of To Hell With Johnny Manic (2019), presents a protagonist whom some readers will find difficult to like. But after the author introduces the bitter Leona and reveals details of Claire’s formative years, readers will sympathize with the protagonist’s prickly nature. Importantly, the author has Claire experience some personal growth; specifically, she realizes that she must change her ways in order to thrive—and nudging her in that new direction is the wounded but gritty veteran that someone has hired to protect her. Diamond does a masterful job of unspooling the conspiracy at the heart of the story, and the quickly changing circumstances force Claire to learn how to improvise. (It certainly helps, however, that the bad guys have hired inept thugs to stalk her.) All through the narrative, Claire moves toward a new life path, and it will be intriguing to watch her develop further in planned future outings.
An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73413-922-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.
When their father dies on the cliffs of his California estate, estranged half-siblings unite to investigate possible foul play.
As Dave’s seventh novel opens, the reader learns something the characters don’t know: Hotel magnate Liam Noone did not fall by accident. He was pushed—by whom and for what reason are unclear. The police have deemed it an accident and closed the case, but his son, Sam, is not so sure. Though he hasn’t seen his half sister, Nora, in years, he shows up at her workplace in New York to ask her to go with him to California to investigate. This part of the story is told by Nora in the first person. We get a lot of information about Nora—she has recently lost both parents, she’s an authority on neuroarchitecture, she is engaged to a New York chef but has an ex in the wings—but somehow don’t get much of a feel for her as a person as she and Sam race around investigating leads and having defensive, snappy conversations. A second narrative thread begins 50 years in the past and follows the development of a romance between Liam and a woman named Cory, who is not one of his three ex-wives, nor is she a woman named Cece with whom he had a mysterious connection. The novel relies on the tension created by all these missing puzzle pieces to plunge swiftly forward, but there’s nothing really at stake—no strong suspects, no wrongly accused, no contested inheritance; it’s all just digging up the secrets of a dead person so his children can understand him now that it’s too late. Actually, nobody really understands each other in this book, and as the characters suspiciously keep each other at arm’s length, the effect extends to the reader as well. Other potentially interesting topics—neuroarchitecture (designing spaces that support emotional well-being), the high-end hotel business—are similarly set up but not explored.
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668002933
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
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