by G.A. McKevett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2016
The trip home has a dampening effect on the usually sanguine Savannah, who can’t seem to keep her eyes on the prize.
Private eye Savannah Reid (Killer Gourmet, 2015, etc.) gets to relive every single trauma of her childhood at her high school reunion.
It’s hard to imagine why Savannah wants to go back and see all the classmates who humiliated her for being poor and homely as a child. Maybe the reunion gives her an excuse to be in McGill, Georgia, along with most of her eight siblings—not counting Macon, who’s locked up for yet another DWI—when they celebrate the birthday of her beloved Granny Reid. Maybe it’s to show off her spiffy new spouse, Detective Sgt. Dirk Coulter. Whatever the reason, the trip is a train wreck. Jeanette Parker, mean as ever, taunts Savannah from the get-go. Since her rich, elderly husband recently bit the dust, Jeanette’s got plenty of bling to wave under the detective’s nose. And Savannah can hardly forget how Jeanette seduced her high school boyfriend, Tommy Stafford. When the purple-frocked princess makes fun of Dirk, that’s it—Savannah cold-cocks her in the parking lot. Jeanette walks away from that fracas, but the next day she isn’t so lucky. Her body is found in the lake, inside her purple Cadillac, with a wound to the head that looks as if it just might have come from the stiletto heel Savannah’s sister lent her. Tom Stafford, now the local sheriff, has no choice but to swear out a warrant for his ex-girlfriend, and pretty soon Savannah is in the McGill jailhouse listening to indecent proposals from Yukon Bill, her octogenarian cellmate. Can Dirk find Jeanette’s killer and spring his lovely wife, or will Savannah have to bust out of the hoosegow to help him solve the case?
The trip home has a dampening effect on the usually sanguine Savannah, who can’t seem to keep her eyes on the prize.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0078-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Allen Eskens ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2014
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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