Marion’s constant shuttling between different time periods may intensify her heroine’s anxiety, but it lends some heft and...
A haunted house’s latest inhabitants go missing without a trace.
In a quest to keep Battersea Bluffs—a house in Cape Cod built by her family generations ago—from foreclosure, Cassie Mitchell decides to rent out a part of the property to a young couple who show up on her doorstep. A strong believer in fate, Cassie finally feels that she can quit fretting about her finances when Vince and Ashley Jacobson agree to help fix the rentable portion of the property in exchange for housing. Though Cassie is no social butterfly, she finds herself opening up to the sweet young couple, and her warmth is reciprocated even if her openness is not. One day on a picnic bike ride, Ashley and Vince disappear, and Cassie, desperately trying to piece together what happened, realizes how little she knows about the two. Marion (The Fools Truth, 2016) focuses on three time periods: the recent past of Cassie’s time with the couple, her present-day search, and the distant past of her family history and a curse that’s haunted the Mitchell clan for generations. Years ago, Robert Toomey cursed Percy Mitchell and his wife, Celeste, after Toomey’s promised marriage fell through, and generations of Mitchells have felt the effects of the spurned Toomey’s terror. Unlike her sister, Zoe, Cassie believes the spirits of Battersea Bluffs will help guide her to the truth. Pragmatic local police officer Brooks Kincaid, Zoe’s long-ago boyfriend, aims to help Cassie find her missing tenants, but his earnest efforts are pushed aside when savvy city FBI agent Daniel Benjamin takes an interest in the case. Cassie doesn’t care who helps her as long as Vince and Ashley return safely, but with Brooks wondering in her ear, she can’t help but suspect that the FBI’s involvement means there’s more at stake than her grandmother’s missing picnic basket.
Marion’s constant shuttling between different time periods may intensify her heroine’s anxiety, but it lends some heft and complexity to an otherwise straightforward search.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-843-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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
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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