The spirit of Christmas present is marred by murder.
Letitia “Tish” Tarragon, chef and owner of Cookin’ the Books Café in Hobson Glen, Virginia, has been tapped to run a food stand at the local holiday fair. With plenty of help from her usual loyal work crew and weatherman Jules Davis, her old college pal, she’s turning out delectable food and drink. The stars of the fair are the members of the Williamsburg Theater Group, who are performing Twelfth Night and A Christmas Carol on a tight schedule. Tish offers to deliver food to the players, who are all living in trailers nearby, and her sympathetic ear soon has them baring their souls and complaining about Jenny Inkpen, the attractive young addition to the company. Justin Dange added Jenny to the group after he saw her busking in Savannah, but she dumped him for another group member who could promote her career even more effectively. When Tish discovers Jenny shot dead in her trailer, she uses the skills she honed in The Garden Club Murder (2019) to help Sheriff Reade, who’s more than a little in love with her. The confounding discovery that Jenny Inkpen doesn’t exist forces the sheriff to scramble to discover the victim’s real identity while Tish continues to hear more of the secrets that make all the thespians suspects.
A foodie’s delight with lashings of Southern charm, theater lore, and a puzzling mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8989-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
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Combines disarming sensitivity to the nuances of the tangled relations among the characters with sledgehammer plotting.
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A master of the no-holds-barred law enforcement thriller turns to legal intrigue, with shattering results.
A week before he’s to stand trial for the aggravated assault and rape of DataTel district manager Tammy Karlsen, car-dealership scion Andrew Tenant fires his lawyer and asks for a new one: Leigh Collier, a rising star at an Atlanta white-shoe firm. Originally baffled by the request, Leigh quickly realizes that her new client has a special reason to have asked for her: He’s recognized her from a magazine photo as the older sister of Callie, the babysitter who killed his father, Buddy Waleski, when his latest pedophile assault on her turned violent 23 years ago. In fact, the truth is even darker than that. Leigh was an active participant in the killing. Now she's determined to do everything she can to torpedo the defense she's preparing for Andrew, who’s accused of stabbing Tammy Karlsen in exactly the way Callie stabbed his father, while persuading both her client and her watchful senior partner that she’s doing her utmost to represent him. As she learns more and more particulars about the case and her client, Leigh realizes that her plan doesn’t go nearly far enough. Andrew is guilty of this assault and others, but he doesn’t just want her to get him off: He plans to blackmail her into complying with a potentially endless series of demands. How can she strike back at a monster who holds all the cards? Only by tapping into the depthless power of sisterhood with Callie, who’s descended into addiction but still loves Leigh with a ferocity that makes the pair of them as dangerous as the man who’s targeted them.
Combines disarming sensitivity to the nuances of the tangled relations among the characters with sledgehammer plotting.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-285809-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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PROFILES
A plain-Jane daughter’s 31st birthday celebration explodes into a nightmare within a nightmare in Slaughter’s latest stand-alone.
Andrea Oliver’s always felt inferior to her parents. Her father, Gordon Oliver, is a trusts and estates attorney; her mother, Dr. Laura Oliver, is a speech therapist. Andy herself has never aspired to any career goal higher than serving as an assistant to someone important. Even when she left Belle Isle, Georgia, for the Big Apple, she got nowhere, and she was only too eager to return home when her mother announced three years ago that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. As the two women mark Andy’s birthday by sharing lunch in a mall cafe, a crazed shooter opens fire on a mother-and-daughter pair who’ve stopped to greet Laura, and Andy’s life changes in an instant. Or rather two instants, the first when the shots ring out and the second when Laura, after inviting the killer to shoot her next, coolly and dispassionately dispatches him. It takes the dazed Andy hours to realize that her mother’s not at all who she seems to be, and by the time she’s ready to accept the fact that Laura Oliver is a woman with a past, that past is already racing to catch up with both mother and daughter. Cutting back and forth between Andy’s harrowing flight to nowhere after Laura pushes her out of her home and a backstory 30 years earlier involving the Army of the Changing World, a cell of amateur terrorists determined to strike a mortal blow against greedy capitalists and, it eventually turns out, each other as well, Slaughter (The Good Daughter, 2017, etc.) never abates her trademark intensity, and fans will feel that the story is pumping adrenalin directly into their bloodstreams. Long before the end, though, the impostures, secret identities, hidden motives, and double-crosses will have piled up past the point of no return, leaving the tale to run on adrenalin alone.
Reading anything by Slaughter is like riding a particularly scary amusement park ride. Reading this one is like booking a season ticket on a ride that never lets you off.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243027-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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