Scottoline’s women (Mistaken Identity, 1999, etc.)—well-crafted and appealing—have always been an unfailing strength. Not...
An unpersuasive legal thriller about a man crying mea culpa everywhere and getting the same response as Chicken Little.
Jack Newlin, a prominent Philadelphia corporation lawyer, arrives home late, discovers his wife stabbed to death, and decides on the spot that his 16-year-old daughter is the killer. Wife and daughter (adolescent daughter, to boot)have not been getting along. Imagine that. Well, a dad’s got to do what a dad’s got to do, he tells himself, and wastes no time putting himself in the frame. He smears his hands with blood, adds a few other authenticating touches to the crime scene, and plans his bogus confession. Having turned himself in, he finds the cops don’t really believe him, yet they arrest him anyway. After all, it’s not every day they get that much perp cooperation. In custody now, his next step is to hire a callow, untried criminal lawyer, because a hotshot might get him off. Enter Mary DiNunzio. Working late, she just happens to be near a phone when Jack’s call comes in to her law firm, and within ten minutes he hires her. At first glance, Mary seems the ideal choice: She is genuinely callow—her criminal-law experience is negligible to nonexistent. But soon enough Jack realizes she has grit, gumption, and the innate busybody quality of a born gumshoe. Further to his consternation, Mary doesn’t believe his story either. In fact, nobody does, which means Jack has a very hard time staying in jail. That proves to be a good thing, though, since when Mary finally solves the crime, the killer turns out not to have been Jack’s daughter after all. Imagine that.
Scottoline’s women (Mistaken Identity, 1999, etc.)—well-crafted and appealing—have always been an unfailing strength. Not here, though. Mary seems mailed in, a stick figure who isn’t much help in making unlikely things credible.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019609-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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