An appealing sleuth headlines a solid thriller with panache.
A Texas lawyer fights to protect her client’s valuable artworks—and solve the woman’s murder—in this seventh installment of a mystery series.
When Ellie Windom misses an appointment, attorney Alice Greer drives to her client’s home to check on her. She’s surprised to see Ellie’s horse inside the house, then discovers the 73-year-old widow’s body as well. Ellie had been pondering her will—what to leave her two sons and the daughter she gave up for adoption more than 50 years ago. As the woman’s executor, Alice, inventorying Ellie’s other home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, unearths a box stuffed with an artist’s prints. Apparently, someone thinks the prints are valuable, as Alice narrowly dodges intruders at the home and makes a tense drive back to Texas with the artworks. The lawyer now has her hands full; she’s dealing with Ellie’s sons, who have long feuded over their inheritance, making either one the woman’s possible killer. In settling the estate, Alice connects with Ellie’s birth daughter and the child’s father, Roger Preyer. But things get even more complicated when it seems someone, for whatever reason, is trying to kill Roger. Foster’s hero is, as always, whip-smart and affable. Alice skillfully manages her eternally busy professional and personal lives; in the midst of her amateur murder investigation, she defends the local library against a lawsuit that seeks to ban Harry Potter books. Many supporting characters are as likable as Alice, including her boyfriend, Ben Kinsear, and his daughters, who don’t think twice about chasing down potentially dangerous criminals. The taut mystery delivers a handful of twists and doesn’t make identifying the culprit easy. But the suspense is even better, with Alice’s Santa Fe trips exceptional set pieces. These entail nerve-wracking searches in a dusty attic with only a flashlight beam and noises that may or may not indicate that someone else is in the house.
An appealing sleuth headlines a solid thriller with panache.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73272-291-0
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Stuart's Creek Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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