Monthly Archives: November 2013

by | November 29, 2013 · 9:15 am

Nicholas Sparks. The Longest Ride. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2013.

The Longest RideNicholas Sparks returns with another solid effort that is sure to have readers everywhere reaching for Kleenex. The Longest Ride, Sparks’ seventeenth novel, weaves together two seemingly disparate love stories. Readers might not immediately spot any connections, however, by the conclusion of the novel, Sparks stitches the two stories together with surprising poignancy.

The first story concerns 91-year old Ira Levinson and his beloved and deceased wife, Ruth. As the novel opens, the combination of Ira’s failing eyesight and a snowstorm has caused him to run his car off the road and down a steep embankment. The front of his car has smashed into a tree, and Ira is lodged tight in his damaged car. From what Ira can tell, he has sustained several possible injuries. If he tries to climb out, with his age, his wounds, and the icy slope, he would never be able to make it back to the road. So Ira has no choice but to wait in his car until someone discovers him. While Ira bides his time, he imagines that his late wife, Ruth has materialized in the passenger seat of the car.

She and Ira reminisce about their marriage. Their story starts in Greensboro. They met through their families. Ruth’s parents recently immigrated from the threat of Hitler’s burgeoning regime and Ira’s parents owned a local haberdashery. The courtship was slow and managed to endure through World War II. Ira revisits all the unexpected twists in their lives, some good and others bad. Ruth, or at least the fantasy of her, helps keep Ira conscious as he struggles to hold onto life. Sparks drums up a great depth of emotion and convincing detail with Ira and Ruth’s romance. Readers will feel invested in this plot line and will wonder what will happen to Ira. Will someone rescue him in time?

Meanwhile, in the second story, Sophia, an art history major and senior at Wake Forest, has called it quits with her unfaithful boyfriend Brian.  She has discovered that Brian has cheated on her once again. She insists to herself that this will be the last time–she is done with him. But slipping away from Brian’s clutches is easier said than done – as evidenced by her past failed attempts to break it off. As Sophia’s best friend Marcia puts it, Brian “is funny, good-looking and rich” plus he’s the most popular guy in his fraternity. Essentially, he possesses all the characteristics of a perfect catch (minus the infidelities, of course).  Brian can’t accept that the relationship is over. He has followed Sophia around campus since the break up and she’s sick and a little bit scared of his stalking.

During a weekend trip to a bull-riding competition with her sorority sisters, Brian approaches Sophia. Just before the confrontation escalates into something nasty, one of the cowboys intercedes and diffuses the situation. After the awkward incident Sophia and the cowboy, named Luke, become acquainted. Luke lives with his mother on a ranch near King. He competes in bull-riding competitions partially out of love of riding and partially to help pay the bills. Soon Sophia is spending all her free time with Luke. Marcia warns her against leaping so quickly into another long-term relationship and predicts that Sophia and Luke’s lives are headed in different paths. For a while, the pair is blissfully happy. Then the real world intervenes–Luke withholds a serious secret, and Sophia feels pressured about finding a job after she graduates in the spring. Can the new couple brave the strain from the outside world, or will the hard realities of life crush their relationship?

Despite the surface differences, the two love stories mirror each other in several respects. Ruth and Sophia are both immigrants with who have an affinity for art and date rich, important men. Ira and Luke are the men who stand on the sidelines and come to marvel that such special women could fall for them instead of the obvious choice. Ira and Ruth’s tale is expansive in its recollection, but the actual story within the span of the novel is compacted given the parameters of the car accident in terms of time and space. Luke and Sophia’s romance is more spread out and has a longer time frame to develop. Sparks alternates between the two stories, told from the point-of-view of Ira, Sophia, and Luke. Together they play off each other nicely – one love story at its end and the other at its beginning.

Check out this title in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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by | November 27, 2013 · 9:02 am

Marilee Haynes. a.k.a. Genius. Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2013.

a.k.a. GeniusHow can somebody who can’t even open a locker be called a genius? Well, Einstein couldn’t tie his shoes. So maybe Gabe Carpenter really is a genius. In any event, his IQ test results peg him as exceptionally bright.  However, Gabe isn’t sure that he wants to be labeled as some kind of child prodigy. To Gabe, middle school is about blending in and his survival strategy is to go unnoticed. If you blend in, then you can avoid the gossip mill. Unfortunately for Gabe, now that his sister Sabrina spilled the news, it’s going to be impossible for him to fly under the radar.

As if being the central subject for hallway taunts wasn’t enough, Gabe’s newfound status as resident genius jeopardizes his relationship with Maya, his second-best friend. Maya wears “the smartest student at St. Jude Middle School” label with pride and she’s not pleased to see Gabe steal that title away from her. Gabe’s teachers and parents have raised their expectations too. Getting Bs on tests isn’t acceptable any longer. Now that Gabe is a certified genius, his parents loan him out to tutor other St. Jude’s students, which wouldn’t so be difficult if Gabe didn’t have to tutor his crush, Becca. Teaching math while feeling tongue-tied isn’t easy, even for a genius.

The school also enrolled Gabe in a special extracurricular class for gifted students. Only six students in at St. Jude’s can take the class.  Maya, his former second-best friend, and Linc (short for Lincoln Jefferson Truman, thanks to a pair of overly ambitious parents), his best friend, are in the Greater Achieving Students class as well. Rachel, the cutest girl at St. Jude’s, Ty, the basketball star, and Cameron, wise-cracking smart talker round out the remainder of the Greater Achieving Students.

Sister Stephanie, or Sister Stevie as she prefers to be called, instructs the course. She explains that the class will focus on science and literature primarily and there will be no grades. The goal for the program is to enrich the selected students’ minds rather than quantify their intelligence like the rest of their classes. Principal Dooley and Sister Stevie decided that the Greater Achieving Students should participate in a state-wide competition that will pit them against middle schools all across North Carolina. Sister Stevie insists that the students work as a team to beat the reigning champion, Overton Prep. But getting six different personalities to collaborate is no simple task. Can the Greater Achieving Students at St. Jude’s pull it off? Or will tensions, like over Gabe’s genius, get in the way?

Marilee Haynes writes convincing from the perspective of a seventh-grade boy. She covers all the bases: girls, social acceptance, bodily functions, friendship, and pizza. Her lively characters and funny situations make a.k.a Genuis a playful and zippy read. But Haynes packs some substance into the book through a bit of family tragedy and the notion that a student is more than a grade or a label.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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by | November 22, 2013 · 4:39 pm

Cassandra King. Moonrise. Bronxville, NY: Maiden Lane Press, 2013.

MoonriseRosalyn Harmon Justice is the perfect wife. She is aristocratic in appearance and attitude. The women of Atlanta’s high society envy her for everything that she has: her refined beauty and cool grace, her family and her friends, and her incredible estate, Moonrise, located in Highlands, North Carolina. When the Victorian home was passed down to Rosalyn through her mother, she spent her summers at Moonrise obsessively – not to mention single-handedly – maintaining its historical authenticity and its splendid moon garden. She was an exemplary woman. Everyone in Rosalyn’s life loved her dearly.

So how can Helen Honeycutt ever try to replace her?

Helen Honeycutt is a divorcée and dietician who recently landed a segment as a TV cook at a news station in Fort Lauderdale. She comes from humble, blue collar origins. The last thing she expected was to become involved with newly widowed Emmet Justice. After his wife Rosalyn’s shocking car accident, Emmet left his anchor position at CNN in Atlanta and relocated to the small-time Fort Lauderdale news station, much to the chagrin of his closest friends. Justice’s esteemed reputation as a TV journalist precedes him. He intimidates most of the employees with his caustic wit and air of gruff authority.

Despite their differences, Helen and Emmet fall in love and marry after only four months of courtship. Their marriage occurs not even a year after Rosalyn’s passing, and Emmet’s core group of friends deem the union in poor taste. Yet the newlyweds seem happy. That is, until Helen discovers Rosalyn’s partially filled scrapbook. Once she pours over the photos and examines the former Mrs. Justice with a magnifying glass, Helen’s imagination goes wild. The disparity between Rosalyn and herself intrigues Helen, of course; Emmet describes Rosalyn as “delicate” and Helen as “earthy.” And she fantasizes about Rosalyn and Emmet’s sophisticated friends: Kit Rutherford, Tansy Dunwoody, Noel Clements, and Dr. Linc and Myna Varner.  But what really grabs Helen’s attention is Moonrise. She demands, uncharacteristically, that she and Emmet spend the summer at Moonrise. After Helen’s entreaties wear him down, Emmet concedes.

But Helen regrets her insistence almost immediately after she and Emmet arrive. When she comes face-to-face with a portrait of Rosalyn in all of her patrician, Nordic beauty, Helen feels gauche and self-conscious. As if the veneer of Rosalyn’s perfection wasn’t enough to rip off the lid on all of Helen’s insecurities, Rosalyn and Emmet’s group of close friends are poised to dislike Helen. They are baffled that Emmet replaced Rosalyn so abruptly after her accident, and with Helen of all women. Comparatively, the men are more charming to Helen. The women are ready to rip “the Bride,” as they call Helen, to shreds with catty comments and gossip. Piled on top of the stress of ostracization, Helen struggles to sleep. Moonrise frightens her.  At night she hears voices and sleeps fitfully. Helen finds that she must exhaust herself, staying up late working on a healthy eating cookbook, before she can fall asleep. With all of this pressure, Helen is nervous and anxious, which drives her to reckless decisions. The memory and mystery of Rosalyn’s death, plus a few nasty tricks played by Kit and Tansy, just might be Emmet and Helen’s undoing.

If novelist Cassandra King’s Moonrise bears a striking resemblance to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, that’s because the book is directly inspired by the classic Gothic tale. King explains on the dust jacket that she brought a copy of Rebecca with her while vacationing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She and her husband, novelist Pat Conroy, rented a summer home in the mountains and Moonrise was inspired by reading DuMaurier’s classic and roaming the gardens of their rented house. King uses a split first-person perspective so that the story is told through Helen, Willa (Moonrise’s housekeeper), and Tansy’s eyes, which succeeds in building upon the atmosphere of gossip and duplicity. At first the Southern Gothic feels supernatural with its shadowy hints of the spectral. By the book’s conclusion, however, the surprising revelation is quite grounded in its secular motivations of covetous and vile human desire.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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by | · 4:34 pm

David Manning. Dead Letters. New York:imPRESSions, 2013.

Duncan Twist struggles to gain his bearings in the small, coastal North Carolina town of Dusktide Beach. Although middle-aged Twist self-identifies as a New Yorker, he did once live in Durham. Nevertheless, Duncan experiences serious culture shock in Dusktide Beach. The locals don’t exactly make Duncan welcome. They remind him that he’s New Yorker who sticks out like sore, Yankee thumb. But Duncan has no intention to stay in Dusktide Beach permanently. His client, Nick Varnish, has loaned him a cottage there for vacation. Duncan works odd jobs, like writing, editing, and researching, for Nick who owns the Brooklyn Bridge Cable Company. Despite his semi-regular freelancing, Nick does not warrant investing a full-time position over Duncan’s services.

When Duncan arrives at the cottage, the key that Nick swore would be waiting for him is not there. Irritated, Duncan speeds back into town in search of a phone, only to be cut off for a parking spot by Lump Whitefish. Duncan later learns that the Whitefish family owns a large stretch of undeveloped land that is the focus of a controversial pending six lane wide bridge. Despite their slightly hostile exchange, Lump sends his aunt, a real estate agent for most of the beach-side properties, to deliver a key to Duncan. Lump’s aunt does not bring the key to Duncan however. A familiar yet unexpected face plays messenger. Tendency Specter, Duncan’s old girlfriend, has relocated to Dusktide Beach, of all places. She acts as the town’s part-time archivist, and is, conveniently, divorced.

Reunited, Tendency and Duncan reflect on their previous relationship and their youthful counterculture days in the 1970s filled with bean sprouts, soy burgers, and the Peace Corps. Tendency wastes no time at introducing Duncan to the local tradition of the Kindred Spirit. The Kindred Spirit occupies Lorne Island in the form of a mailbox and can only be reached by crossing an inlet during low tide. Within the mailbox are two spiral-bound notebooks filled with messages addressed to the Kindred Spirit. The understanding behind the concept is that every person who contributes messages to the notebooks shares a kindred spirit. Townspeople started the tradition in 1968 and Tendency is interested in the phenomenon as the area’s archivist.

A mystery surrounding one of the messages draws in Duncan and Tendency. The message implores the Kindred Spirit for help in locating a notebook missing from the mystical mailbox, as well as a missing person. Things take a turn for the weird when not one, but two, possibly Confederate skeletons turn up. Are the skeletons actually the remains of Confederate soldiers or is it a ruse? As Tendency and Duncan try to uncover the notebook and determine the identity of the missing person, they exhume a host of rivalries and petty squabbles. But this very mystery that has helped to fan the last embers of their former relationship might just tear Tendency and Duncan apart again. After they become deeply involved they realize that someone is not pleased about their investigation and might take ruthless measures to cease their sleuthing.

Manning’s inspiration for the Kindred Spirit is likely drawn from the Kindred Spirit mailbox on Bird Island near Sunset Beach, North Carolina. For other North Carolina novels that feature the Kindred Spirit, look at blog posts on Marybeth Whalen’s romance novel, The Mailbox and Jacqueline DeGroot’s mystery novel, The Secret of the Kindred Spirit.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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by | November 19, 2013 · 10:51 am

Joseph L. S. Terrell. Not Our Kind of Killing. Rock Hill, SC: Bella Rosa Books, 2013.

not our kindCrime writer Harrison Weaver made a frustrating trip to the North Carolina mountains in April.  A young woman had been murdered and left hogtied in her own car.  Harrison’s editor asked him to head up to the mountains to get the story but when Harrison found out that the crime was poorly investigated and the woman’s body cremated without an autopsy, there was not much he could do.  This was one crime that would remain unsolved.  Now it’s May and Harrison is thinking about other things, like his relationship with Elly Pederson. Elly is a widow who works for the county and through her Harrison has gotten to know many locals. After two years on the Outer Banks, he is starting to feel like he might fit in.

But Harrison does not fit in with everyone–not all the county deputies appreciate his style or the way he pokes his nose into police business, and District Attorney Rick Schweikert is especially antagonistic toward him.  So when Harrison finds a young woman’s body near a local kayaking spot, he has some explaining to do.  Not everyone wants to hear about how much this murder resembles the earlier murder in the mountains. But Harrison’s friend SBI agent Thomas Twiddy is open to the connection. As they investigate the local crime, Harrison remembers what the mountain people said about that murder being “not our kind of killing.”  Following this thought leads him to a pair of serial killers.

This is the third Harrison Weaver mystery. The series begins with Tide of Darkness.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2013, Coast, Dare, Mountains, Mystery, Novels in Series, Terrell, Joseph L. S.

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by | November 15, 2013 · 3:59 pm

Emma Carlson Berne. Under Pressure. Minneapolis: Darby Creek, 2013.

under pressureThe title, Under Pressure, nicely sums up Elise Heisel’s life–or maybe just how she sees it. Elise comes from a family of UNC Tar Heels. Four generations of her family have gone to UNC and made good.  Her dad was president of the student body in his senior year, and her mother was a star player on the women’s rugby team.

Elise dreams of going to UNC and playing for the university’s women’s soccer team.  She is an excellent ball handler on the soccer field, but when Elise compares herself to her teammates, she thinks that she lacks stamina and power.  When her high school coach announces that a UNC scout is coming in two weeks to check out the team, Elise goes into a panic.  What can she do to make herself stand out? Elise succumbs to the lure of performance enhancing drugs. When they seem to loose their edge, she decides that it must be because she is carrying too much weight.  In just two weeks, Elise jeopardizes her health, her friendships, and her dream of playing for Carolina.

Under Pressure is a realistic portrayal of how quickly a teen can get in trouble, and the ways family and friends–consciously and unconsciously–affirm or denigrate a girl’s sense of self-worth.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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by | November 11, 2013 · 3:23 pm

Bennett Madison. September Girls. New York: HarperTeen, 2013.

September GirlsSeventeen-year old Sam isn’t excited by his dad’s resolution to spend the summer at a quiet little beach town on the Outer Banks, but he isn’t surprised by the scheme either. Earlier that winter Sam’s mother dropped all her responsibilities and abandoned her husband and her son to spend time at Women’s Land, which the book implies is something of a feminist commune. Prior to her departure, Sam’s mother, a “frumpy kindergarten teacher,” adopted radical feminist tenants, like the SCUM Manifesto, so the act is something of personal (or self-satisfying) liberation for her.

Sam’s dad has dealt with the change by throwing himself into hobbies from yoga to knitting to cooking. Sam jokes “if there was a tear-off sheet on a bulletin board in Starbucks he was willing to give it a try.” So his latest idea to relocate temporarily to the Outer Banks is one of many distractions from the reality of his wife’s abandonment. Jeff, Sam’s brother, has returned from college recently and helps somewhat to plug the hole left by their mother. With Jeff and Sam in tow, their father packs everything up and heads for the beach, even before Sam’s school year ends.

After several months of dealing with his fragile father and pressure from his friends–and now Jeff– to “man up” and “get laid,” Sam wants to escape. He is troubled by ideas of love and manhood. The men in his life don’t exactly provide a shining paragon of masculinity. But soon Sam’s attention is diverted by another presence on at the beach, the Girls. They are blonde and beautiful and, to Sam, interchangeable. Sam watches them working menial summer jobs around town, taking cigarette breaks, flipping through magazines, lying on the beach. Yet the strangest part is not that the Girls are everywhere, but that they are all interested in Sam. They eye him with a lustful hunger.

Sam is befuddled that the Girls notice him rather than his hunky brother, or any other hunky guy around the town for that matter. He is scrawny and awkward, hardly a chick magnet. Then he meets one of the Girls, DeeDee. Normally they travel in pairs, but DeeDee seems different from the rest of the Girls. She and Sam bond, and he feels genuine affection for her. But she hesitates. There is a mystery of an otherworldly nature surrounding her and the rest of the Girls. When Sam learns the truth behind the secret, it alters his relationship with DeeDee irreparably.

Novelist Bennett Madison captures pitch-perfect the crude exchanges between Sam, Jeff, and their father, and Sam’s constant cynicism sounds like a teenager attempting jaded and world-weary angst. Madison structures the novel traditionally and from Sam’s perspective with numbered chapters, but he weaves in parallel chapters from the Girls with named chapters. The interspersed chapters from the Girls read like an echo and function similarly to a Greek chorus, summarizing background information and responding to and supplementing the story’s action. These chapters also successfully bolster the mythic quality of the story. However, Madison maintains a clean balance between the fairy tale and the reality. Madison’s treatment of Sam and his story is based the development of a boy tripping around the edge of manhood and a confused family trying to mend life’s rips and holes.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2013, Children & Young Adults, Coast, Currituck, Dare, Hyde, Madison, Bennett

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by | · 3:19 pm

John Milliken Thompson. Love and Lament. New York: Random House, 2013.

Love and LamentDeath trails fast on the heels of the Hartsoe family. At age six, the youngest Hartsoe, Mary Bet, mistakes a circuit rider for the Devil. She cowers in the shadow of the Devil on horseback with hobnail boots and a black handlebar moustache. Soon after the encounter, Mary Bet’s eight other brother and sisters and her mother begin dying off, one by one, as if in a orchestrated funeral procession. Mary Bet believes that the Hartsoe family is cursed. But her generation and her father’s clutch to life during one of America’s more trying, transitional phases – Reconstruction.

Mary Bet’s father, Rezin Cicero, or R.C. for short, fought in the Civil War and wants to distance himself from the memories of battle. However, the constant reminder of his peg leg makes moving on a challenge. His miserly father, Samuel Hartsoe, withheld the family business from him. Samuel believes that R.C. should learn and labor to generate his own fortune. R.C. manages a general store and married one of William “Captain Billie” Murchison’s daughters, Susan Elizabeth. R.C. and Susan Elizabeth’s marriage tangles the family trees somewhat awkwardly. Samuel Hartsoe still feels lingering indignation that his father, John Siler, sold the Hartsoe family home to the drunken and vulgar Captain Billie rather than bequeathing it to him. As R.C.’s children and his wife die by a seeming string of dumb and simple misfortune, his faith flags. He rejects what others mourn as God’s will and he descends into madness. His youngest daughter, Mary Bet watches guiltily while R.C.’s body and mind decay. Love and Lament is a story concerned with the tension of family relationships, community exchanges, and constant hardships.

Meanwhile, Mary Bet, the story’s heroine, matures as the broken, war-torn South ushers in new industrialization and alterations in established values at the turn of the century. Mary Bet was born the year the railroad arrived in Haw County, a loosely fictionalized version of Chatham County. Mary Bet is a figure of the New South and a liminal character. She struggles to unshackle herself and move beyond the past. In her will, Mary Bet’s mother Susan Elizabeth deeds her jewels to her prettiest daughter, her silver to her most ambitious, and the family Bible to Mary Bet. Her mother’s gift appoints Mary Bet as the keeper of the Hartsoe family history. And fittingly so — Mary Bet is the only one of R.C. and Susan Elizabeth’s children to enter adulthood after all. From the rubble of the old world, Mary Bet emerges as a modern woman.

Novelist John Milliken Thompson spins a family saga rooted in the Southern Gothic tradition that spans from Reconstruction to World War I. The grief of the Hartsoe family echoes the changing climate of post-Civil War South. Thompson relates his story with mesmerizing and authentic detail that evokes great pathos for the Hartsoe clan. His rendering of Mary Bet from age six to age thirty rings true. With Mary Bet and the rest of the Hartsoes, Thompson accentuates how memory and history can haunt us, from the past long into the future.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2013, Chatham, Historical, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Piedmont, Thompson, John Milliken

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by | November 8, 2013 · 4:43 pm

Joyce and Jim Lavene. A Haunting Dream. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2012.

hauntingDae O’Donnell has been enjoying her life.  She’s in her first term as the mayor of Duck, North Carolina and her popularity is high, in part because of her role in keeping the local bookshop and coffee house open.  Dae’s also in a relationship with a very nice man, Kevin Brickman, who’s been running the Blue Whale Inn for the past year.  Kevin is from away, but he fits in with the locals the way few outsiders do.  His background as an FBI agent never comes up, and although Dae knows that Kevin was once engaged to an FBI colleague, she doesn’t dwell on it.

But suddenly, she has to.  Kevin’s former fiancée, Ann, shows up, seemingly wanting to pick up where they left off.  But Kevin is not the same person, and neither is Ann.  As work partners, Kevin and Ann pulled a number of missing child cases.  When they they failed to find a child alive, it was hard on them, so hard that Ann eventually broke down.  The woman who shows up in Duck is a wraith, still showing evidence of her trauma and institutionalization.  Given Ann’s state, Dae decides that she needs to keep some distance from Kevin while he and Ann sort things out.  And Dae has some business to attend to.  Her elderly neighbor, Mac Sweeney, enlists Dae’s help in finding a missing medallion, one that Old Man Sweeney had picked up in a grocery store parking lot.  When Dae calls upon her psychic gift to find the medallion, she sees a vision of its true owner, local realtor Chuck Sparks, being shot.  Soon she finds his body, but not his young daughter.  As she attempts to find the girl, Dae learns about a criminal ring trading in stolen artifacts, people who will do anything to get their hands on certain treasures.  The FBI are called in, but when Dae senses that time is running out for the girl, she and Ann join forces.

This is the fourth Missing Pieces Mystery.  To start the series at the beginning, read A Spirited Gift.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2012, Coast, Dare, Lavene, Jim and Joyce, Mystery, Novels in Series

by | November 4, 2013 · 5:03 pm

Kathy Reichs. Bones of the Lost. New York: Scribner, 2013.

Bones of the LostThings just aren’t going Temperance Brennan’s way. At the opening of Kathy Reichs’ sixteenth installment of her best-selling Temperance Brennan series, Temperance is stuck tapping her toes in a very uncomfortable pair of Louboutin pumps at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse. She was called for jury duty and even though her role as medical examiner will exempt her from selection, the inexperienced prosecutor makes Brennan jump through all the hoops first. Because losing more than half a day wasn’t enough, Brennan locks herself out of her car with her purse and cell phone inside. After several unsuccessful attempts to jimmy open the lock and an awkward exchange with an overeager parking attendant turned vigilante, an unwanted savior arrives.

Police detective Erskine “Skinny” Sliddell appears and gives Brennan a lift back to the Medical Examiner’s office. But not before filling her in on the latest case. Early that morning, an unidentified teen was killed in a hit and run. Although the girl didn’t have any form of ID for herself, she was carrying John-Henry Story’s U.S. Airways club card. Story was a businessman who died when a fire broke out at his flea market six months ago. Or at least, Brennan determined that the remains found at the scene fit the profile for Story. Sliddell speculates that the Jane Doe was involved in prostitution, based on her possessions, her estimated time of death, and her location. When Brennan returns to the Medical Examiner’s office, she examines the Jane Doe’s body. Because of the nature of the case (young, innocent victim and brutal death), Brennan struggles to not let her emotions overrule her logic, especially when she rules the supposed accident to be something more sinister. The Jane Doe wasn’t killed by accident, she was murdered.

Brennan is already busy though. She has four sets of mummified dog remains from Peru that she must certify as human or nonhuman. U.S. Customs seized the remains from former Marine, Dominick Rockett upon his reentry to the country. Rockett has a history of smuggling smaller antiques and trinkets out of South America. His usual inventory consists of inexpensive jewelry, crafts, and home wares. But apparently Rockett is expanding his market.  The two crimes run parallel at first, but as Brennan investigates with a keener eye, she identifies that both cases involve illegal trafficking of goods and that some of the implicated figures overlap.

Meanwhile, Reichs weaves in elements of Brennan’s personal life into the story. Her daughter Katy has enlisted in the army as a means to recover from the grief of her boyfriend’s unexpected death. Katy soothed her mother’s anxieties by reassuring that she would never be sent into combat. Then the US Army lifted the ban on women in combat and sent Katy to Afghanistan. But Brennan gets the opportunity to visit Katy overseas. Her estranged husband Pete, who is pressuring her for divorce papers, pressures Brennan into traveling to Afghanistan to help out an old buddy’s nephew who is accused of shooting two unarmed villagers. Pete wants Brennan to exhume the bodies and take the stand as an expert witness. With the promise of seeing Katy, Brennan boards Turkish Airlines to do a little extra detective work. And, as it turns out, Brennan owes Pete a huge thank you. Going to Afghanistan helps her lace the evidence together and reveal a surprising conspiracy at work.

Browse the blog for other coverage on Reichs’ Temperance Brennan series. You can filter the search by clicking on and navigating through the author category in the top right-hand column. With this view you can see all the past authors we have blogged about and the number of entries available. Or click on the categories and tags below.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2010-2019, 2013, Mecklenburg, Mystery, Novels in Series, Piedmont, Reichs, Kathy, Suspense/Thriller

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