Hart’s ghost mysteries (Ghost in Trouble, 2010, etc.) are often amusing and never easy to solve. Bailey Ruth’s latest is one...
A heavenly sleuth gets hijacked on her way to apply for a new case.
Bailey Ruth Raeburn is one of the most unorthodox sleuths in Heaven’s Department of Good Intentions. So she’s far from sanguine about her chances of getting sent back to Earth by department head Wiggins, who often chastises her for ignoring the rules. All that changes when a stunning woman riding a magnificent black horse sweeps up Bailey Ruth, thrusts a ticket into her hand and throws her on the Rescue Express, which spirits her back to her old hometown of Adelaide, Okla., just in time to prevent a young man from being shot. Nick Magruder, the nephew of equestrian Dee Delahunt Duvall, has recently returned to Adelaide a very wealthy young man after selling the spider-based video game he developed. Nick has a chip on his shoulder and intends to get even with all the high school jocks who tormented him. He’s madly in love with Jan, whose mother, Arlene, is having an affair with Cole Clanton, one of the worst of Nick’s high school tormentors. When Jan arrives on the scene, Bailey Ruth pretends to be a private detective hired to protect Nick. She and Nick are forced to spend the night at Arlene’s B&B when Bailey Ruth realizes that her usual power to change her wardrobe or vanish has forsaken her. Clanton is deeply involved with an upcoming historical recreation, but Bailey Ruth suspects that his sudden interest in the town’s history is financially motivated. When Clanton is shot dead, Nick is arrested, since half the town heard him threatening Clanton. So Bailey Ruth and Dee persuade Wiggins to let them get to work identifying the real killer.
Hart’s ghost mysteries (Ghost in Trouble, 2010, etc.) are often amusing and never easy to solve. Bailey Ruth’s latest is one of her toughest cases.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-425-26075-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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