A promising debut highlights the pleasures of the sunny Amalfi coast.
Murder threatens an Italian innkeeper’s dream.
To the Positanesi, Bria Bartolucci, who grew up in neighboring Ravello, might as well have been from Australia. But when her husband, Carlo, announced he was buying a bed-and-breakfast in the seaside town, Bria was swept up in his enthusiasm for the unexpected but welcome adventure. Now, a year later, Bria’s on the verge of unveiling Bella Bella, although without Carlo, who was killed in a plane crash. Her determination to open despite her loss is a tribute to her love for Carlo and her desire to provide for their 8-year-old son, Marco, in her own right. (Carlo’s immensely rich mother, Imperia, has already set up a trust fund that will secure Marco’s future.) A week before the scheduled opening, Bria is jolted by discovering a stranger stabbed to death in one of Bella Bella’s upstairs bedrooms. In a panic, she calls her friend Rosalie Vivaldi even before calling Rosalie’s brother, Luca, who happens to be Positano’s chief of police. Bria’s closest friends rally to her side, along with her mother, Fifetta D’Abruzzo, and even the chilly Imperia. Bria, afraid that the murder will become one more reason for the larger Positanesi community to reject her, does her best to solve the case on her own. But there are many looming questions. Who is the dead stranger? How did he find his way to Bella Bella? Why was he in possession of a bag filled with counterfeit lire, a currency no longer in use? Even if these may take a village to answer, Bria’s adopted home proves itself up to the challenge.
A promising debut highlights the pleasures of the sunny Amalfi coast.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781496742131
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.
Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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