Fans of Shepard’s other books will be pleased.
Lenna Schmidt arrives with her baby, Jacob, at a “mommune” outside Tucson, where she’s trying to reconnect with an old friend. Little does she suspect that someone pulled strings to get her there.
Two years ago, out of the blue, Lenna struck up a deep friendship with Rhiannon Cook, whom she met at an H&M store in Los Angeles. Mourning the loss of her mother, with whom she was incredibly close, Lenna hasn’t had many friends in her life. Rhiannon can be judgmental, particularly toward Gillian, a woman who hangs around the building where they all work, and Frederick, a co-worker on whom Lenna has a crush. But it turns out her life hasn’t always been easy; she tells Lenna that when she was young, her mother drove off a bridge with both her and her brother in the car, and her brother died. One day, Rhiannon skips town, leaving Lenna high and dry; in the radio silence that follows, Lenna begins to be friendly with Gillian, who has some pretty choice things to say about Rhiannon and, really, everyone else, including her roommate, Sadie. Now, two years later, Lenna has a secret—plus a husband, and a new baby—so when Rhiannon reaches out to see if she might want to visit the all-woman commune where she lives, Lenna agrees, hoping they might be able to clear the air. But what is supposed to be a sanctuary hides a malevolent presence from the past—someone hellbent on revenge. Lenna has to summon stores of courage and protective mother energy if she’s going to survive. Plenty of twists and turns, as well as some staggered narration—different voices, different time periods—keep the mystery moving. The payoff is okay. The thrills are fine. The deepest insight Shepard has to offer comes at the end: “All these missed chances, all these mistakes. It’s amazing people invest in friendship at all.”
Fans of Shepard’s other books will be pleased.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593186961
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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