Escape by Robert Tannenbaum
Two stories with a VERY thin connection and way too much detail. Should have been two separate books instead of one 700-page book. I struggled to get through it.
Dark Summer by Iris Johansen
Do dogs have healing powers? Bad guy Danner thinks so and wants to kill the dogs Jude Marrok has to get the great panacea. Devon Brady is a vet Marrok meets on a search & rescue mission...typical guy meets gal scenario. An average story; nothing more.
Kay is summoned to New York because a guy in Bellevue will only talk to her and let her examine him. She goes, of course, and soon realizes she’s hearing a fake story from Oscar Bane and wonders about his self-inflicted wounds. He’s accused of killing his girlfriend. Kay can’t tell anyone, not even Benton, what she learned from Oscar, Lucy is called to figure out what’s what with the deceased’s laptops and who the emails are from, and the deceased’s neighbor is found dead. Obviously, the question is whodunit…which I figured out.
Benton and Kay are now married and she’s left Charleston to live with him in McLean VA, but they also work in NYC; Pete Marino disappeared from Kay’s life after an incident in Charleston and just happens to be back on the job at NYPD; and Lucy just happens to have opened a new business in the area. Just amazing how everyone managed to get back together again….oh, please spare me all these ridiculous situations. Lots of technical stuff could have been left out to make this 400 pages or less and it still would have been just an OK book.
Kyle McAvoy is editor of the Law Review at Yale and has a bright future ahead of him…until an indiscretion from college rears its ugly head. He is blackmailed by the mysterious Bennie Wright who has a video of the incident. Kyle must a) forget doing community law work and head right to a mega-big law firm in New York; b) get into the litigation section; c) steal documents from a big case and d) all his troubles will go away. Yeah, right.
No mystery or intrigue here; and the only suspense is who is Bennie and who’s he working for. I kept reading hoping for a good end, but was disappointed.
When new detective Moses Reed gets the call that a body has been found in LA’s Bird Marsh, he enlists Milo Sturgis’ help and they find not only the body of a pianist but the bodies of three prostitutes as well…all with their right hand missing. And, of course, Milo calls on Alex Delaware to throw in his two cents. Chief suspect is Travis Huck, the house manager of the wealthy Vander family whose precocious son got piano lessons from the recently departed pianist. If it all sounds a little too confusing, it isn’t. Who’s behind the killings is a bit of a surprise, but not much.
This was one of Mr. K’s better books of late, but certainly not a blockbuster. He used to write really good stories, but lately he seems to have gotten off that track. He needs to put some suspense and surprises back in his stories.
Police Lt. Ty Hauk and his daughter were in a convenience shop when a drive-by shooting killed the man behind them in line. This leads Ty on a hunt for the killer, the theory being it’s a revenge killing. This leads him to a gambling scheme at a popular casino up the road. But the more he delves into the case (against all warnings to leave it alone), the more problems he runs into and more people end up dead. Greed and power seem to have taken over everyone.
It was a bit of a struggle to get through this book. No twist or turns to keep me truly interested and no surprises.
