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FEARED

Synthetic as all get-out, from the scenes with Mary’s oh-so-Italian family to the unlikely events that bring about the...

It had to happen sooner or later: Philadelphia’s premier, mostly female legal partnership, Rosato and DiNunzio, gets sued for sex discrimination.

Just because Bennie Rosato, Mary DiNunzio, and Judy Carrier have hired John Foxman as an associate doesn’t mean they can’t be sued by Stephen McManus, Michael Battle, and Graham Madden, who claim that they’re not willing to turn the firm any more male than it is. Nick Machiavelli, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, has gotten evidence that John’s felt like an outsider while he’s on the job, and since Machiavelli is already holding a grudge against Mary, that’s good enough for him. Beginning with the accusatory press conference he convenes, things rapidly go from bad to worse. John quits the firm, leaving Judy to carry the ball alone in pressing their little-guy client London Technologies’ case against superrival Home Hacks. Then he gets himself murdered, and Detective Jason Krakoff, of Philadelphia Homicide, quickly ascertains that Judy had been dating John until they broke up, within the hearing of witnesses, an hour or two before the murder. The London Technologies plaintiffs start wavering; the partners can’t turn on the television without seeing Machiavelli crow; a predatory freelance reporter starts dogging the heroines; and Judy looks dead in the water—though Scottoline (Exposed, 2017, etc.) finds little time to develop those last two possibilities because she’s preoccupied with tracing the effects of all this stress on Mary’s late-term pregnancy. Not even a mother’s love could triumph over the dark doings laid out with such professional relish—or so you’d think if you didn’t know the formula, which dictates a sudden late-breaking turn from incredibly bad luck to incredibly good.

Synthetic as all get-out, from the scenes with Mary’s oh-so-Italian family to the unlikely events that bring about the amazingly happy ending. But Scottoline, who obviously knows her readers inside out, hits every mark, and the results are never less than pleasurable, down to the last satisfying twist.

Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-09959-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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REMEMBER WHEN

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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