Monday With Kaye: The Capitalist by Peter Steiner (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Kaye George had a thriller as her subject of review last week with Most Wanted. She does it again  this week to start off August with the fifth book in the Louis Morgon series titled The Capitalist. If you want to read the series in order start with Le Crime.

The Capitalist by Peter Steiner

This is a tale of jaded, cynical characters pitted against a two corrupt international industries, clothing and banking.

The main bad guy, St. John (pronounced SIN-jun) Larrimer, is a man who fancies himself the logical product of present-day world economics, free from moral and political constraints. He bilks anyone he can for his own personal profit and sees nothing wrong in what he’s doing. St. John sneers at Bernard Madoff because he got caught. The story also concerns the many whose lives he ruins when he absconds to the Caribbean with the stolen money after the 2008 market crash.

A horribly maintained sweat shop in Pakistan makes high-end silk pocket squares, ones that St. John loves to wear. When a fire breaks out, many are killed and one, Abinaash Chandha, an intelligent sixteen-year-old seamstress is left burnt and disfigured. Her story of recovery runs in the background as we follow St. John, his cronies, his former-now-ruined secretary, and Louis Morgon, a disgraced ex-CIA agent who is also a talented painter and determined to get justice when several people close to him are tragically affected by the thief. Morgon is an interesting character, another one who disdains conventional morals. His world view is easier to swallow, though, and he functions quite well as the nimble good guy here, though in his seventies.

Some tricky, fascinating spy/detective work goes on and pulls the reader through to the exciting ending. I won’t call it a conclusion because I have the distinct feeling that this war of wits is to be continued.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Eine Kleine Murder, for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: Most Wanted by Lisa Scottoline (Reviewed by Kaye George)

This week it is thriller time with Kaye….

Most Wanted by Lisa Scottoline

As this domestic thriller opens, Christine Nilsson is leaving her job as a reading specialist at Nutmeg Hill grade school and her fellow teachers and faculty members are throwing her a shower. She’s leaving because she is finally pregnant, and rejoices in the fact. Only her best friend and her parents know the truth about the baby, that she and her husband Marcus used a sperm donor because of his low count. This was a difficult

decision, but they’re both happy with the way it’s turning out.

They’ve seen pictures of their donor, known only by a number, Donor 3319, and he’s a handsome, intelligent-looking blonde guy, a medical student, who resembles Marcus. As Christine is helping to clean up after the party, she spots a report on TV of a serial killer, a man who has brutally slain several nurses. The man has been caught and he’s shown being put into a police car. He looks straight into the camera. His name is Zachary Jeffcoat, aka the Nurse Murderer, but Christine realizes he’s also Donor 3319.

Marcus isn’t as convinced as his wife is, at first, and the best friend refuses to believe it. But Christine has to know for sure. She can no longer tell if her nausea is morning sickness or is from knowing that the child she carries, that she loves, is most probably fathered by a murderer. Eventually, this innocent unborn child wreaks havoc between her and Marcus and causes her to defy the orders of her husband and their lawyer, putting herself into a dangerous situation, trying to discover the truth and save her marriage—and her child.

What would you do if you were carrying the baby of a serial killer? This is a gut-wrenching, heart-pounding story.

                     

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Death in the Time of Ice, for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "Down the Darkest Street" by Alex Segura (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Another Monday With Kaye, like air conditioning, is a very good thing…

Down the Darkest Street by Alex Segura

The torrid Miami atmosphere adds to the gritty beginning of this noir tale, the second Pete Fernandez mystery, as he moves from one darkness to the next.

Pete is trying to be a recovering alcoholic. He lives in a quiet Miami suburb with, unfortunately, his ex-wife. That’s supposed to be temporary. He attends AA, but not regularly and not seriously, after the initial events. As the story opens, he’s getting beat up in an alley after consuming prodigious amounts of Jim Beam and beer. When his hand inadvertently strayed to the wrong soft thigh, it led to his take down. As he’s stumbling out of the alley, post-whipping, a van drives by. Pete gets a good look at the driver and at the teen-aged girl curled up beside him. That leads to trouble.

Having lost his job as a sports reporter, he helped a fellow journalist, Kathy Bentley, with a sensational story that brought about the exposure of a mob hitman. The monetary reward was enough to enable him to spend a lot of time thinking about drinking and to work a part-time job in a used bookstore. He doesn’t have many friends. One is Dave, the guy who runs the Book Bin. Another is his potential AA sponsor, Jack.

He needs both of them as he gets caught up in the search for a missing teen girl and draws close to a dangerous, demented killer, like a moth drawn to a flame.

This hardboiled story is written for a quick read, with a nice, taut style, which is good because once you get started, you’ll want to tear through it. I enjoyed it without reading the first one, Silent City, but it might be good to read these in order.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Eine Kleine Murder, for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: “Come Dark” by Steven F. Havill (Reviewed by Kaye George)

When this review came in from Kaye I was thrilled as I am a huge fan of the author and thought this latest book was simply great. Kaye says it was “very nice.” Either way, the read is a good one. If you have not read Steven F. Havill then get to work.

“Come Dark” by Steven F. Havill

This is the most recent in a very long series of Posadas County Mysteries. It’s the twenty-first if I counted right. This fictional county, located in southeast New Mexico, is home to a varied cast of characters. The series started out focusing on aging Undersheriff Bill Gastner, but this book features the current Undersheriff, Estelle Reyes-Guzman. Both are terrific characters, along with others in the department.

As the book opens, vandalism is being discovered at the strange resort being built by local billionaire, Miles Waddell. Waddell has situated NightZone, his theme park on a mountain top that will be accessible by narrow gauge train and a subsequent tram, wanting the tourists to really want to go there. There will be the usual theme park attractions, but also a gigantic radio telescope dish that is already attracting the notice of scientists from all over the world.

Three weeks after Labor Day, on the same day that the public, including press, is invited to tour the facility, a couple of curious cases pop up in the town below. An alert patrolman, Tom Pasquale, notices an old, battered Illinois license plate on a new car outside the megastore, The Spree. At almost the same time, Stacie Stewart walks into The Spree and never comes out. She has left her baby and her dog in the hot car. The two are rescued quickly, but the hunt is on for Stacie. The two in the Illinois car are questioned about the substance found in their vehicle after removing their disguises, but it turns out to be…alfalfa.

One more meanwhile, the popular high school coach has been gunned down in the girls’ shower right after a wildly successful volleyball match.

It was fun to follow all of these threads, guessing (wrong) the whole time about what was going on.

This is a very nice police procedural with touches of wry humor—full of quirky characters.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Requiem in Red, for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "The Good Goodbye" by Carla Buckley

Our final Monday in June brings word by way of Kaye George of quite the family drama…

The Good Goodbye by Carla Buckley

Be prepared for one surprise after another as Buckley takes us into the lives, past and present, of two families pulled apart and pushed together by their relationships in this domestic/family saga thriller.

The story starts near the end. The restaurant that was founded by Natalie and Vince is faltering. Natalie is fearful for what the future holds, but by the end of the first chapter her world comes crashing down in ways she couldn’t have predicted.

Arden, the daughter of Natalie and Theo, and Rory, the daughter of Vince and Gabrielle, has both been badly burned in a fire at their dormitory. It’s freshman year for both of them, a year that’s supposed to be full of hope for the future. Instead, they lie in critical condition. They’re better off than their friend Hunter, though. He died in the blaze.

Accusations swirl as the girls’ conditions continue to cause consternation. The girls were raised together, almost as sisters, and had great expectations that have already come tumbling down before the fire. Everyone’s lives start to unravel as the parents go through the agonizing wait, hoping for improvement in the girls’ conditions. Meanwhile, the reader is taken back through their lives to see how they got to this point—and to wonder how they will go forward.

A gripping, emotional read that will have you following the dim pathways through their lives and their hearts.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Eine Kleine Murder, for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: "Entry Island" by Peter May

Entry Island by Peter May won the Deanston Scottish Crime Novel of the year back in 2014. Today,  Kaye George brings us a review of the book ….

Entry Island by Peter May

Canada seems much more like a foreign country than usual in this polyglot setting. Amid the French-speaking Magdalen Islands (Madeleine in French), lies English-speaking Entry Island, settled in part by Scots who came during the potato famine years in the 1800s.

The story starts slowly, but builds gradually—two stories actually. The modern day narrative sends English speaker, Sime Mackenzie, whose Scottish/Gaelic family refused to leave Quebec when it went all French, to investigate a murder on Entry Island. The rest of the team are French speakers. He is ill at ease with them, but Thomas Blanc, with whom he works most closely, is friendly. One member of the team is his ex, Marie-Ange, a vitriolic, bitter woman who makes everything harder.

As soon as Sime sees the woman who is accused of murdering her husband, he feels he knows her. In spite of overwhelming opinion against her, he fights to find a shred of evidence that she didn’t kill her husband. Sime is suffering from chronic insomnia, but has waking dreams that put him into the tales from his ancestor’s diaries that were read to him by his grandmother when he was a child. The insomnia gets so bad that it threatens to impair his judgement and to get him ousted from his job as he retreats deeper and deeper into the past, imagining that he actually is his ancestor, and that the accused woman is his ancestor’s long-lost love as this story runs alternating with the other one.

This is a tale of two islands, two mysteries, and two places and times. A tale of misfits isolated within their own cultures, and a tale of cultures battling each other, both in the 1800s and today.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Death in the Time of Ice, for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: "Pretty Girls" by Karin Slaughter (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Another Monday as we roll on through June means Kaye George is back with another reading suggestion. This is also release day for Kaye’s new book, DEATH ON THE TREK which is the second book in her People of the Wind series. You should check it out. If an awesome cover truly sells books, this one should sell like crazy!

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

Slaughter’s first psychological thriller, her fifteenth novel, starts out with seemingly unrelated chapters about seemingly unrelated people. This turns out to be a beautiful construction that depicts a shattered Atlanta family. Twenty-four years ago, Julia Carroll disappeared from the University of Georgia campus. She’s never been found and her remaining family doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive.

The tragedy not only split up her parents, Sam and Helen, the aftermath drove a wedge between her sisters, Lydia and Claire, that has lasted eighteen years. Claire married the incredibly successful millionaire, Paul Scott, lives a perfect life, at least to an outside observer. While Lydia, having struggled for years with drug and other legal problems, is climbing out of the messes she’s created and is finding meaning through her daughter, Dee, struggling to send her to a private school she can’t afford.

Now another young, pretty, blonde has gone missing. This one only sixteen, but there are similarities between her and Julia and the media attention is dredging up the old despair and ripping open the wounds of all of them, except Sam, who has already committed suicide. This new disaster could either draw the family back together, or tear them even further apart.

This book is dark, intense, and quite graphic. It will keep you on the edge of your seat with your shoulders tensed for the next blow, then the next, then the next. I stayed up way too late finishing it!




Reviewed by Kaye George, author of “Death in the Time of Ice,” for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "The Girl Without a Name" by Sandra Block

If you wish to read in order the preceding book is Little Black Lies…..

The Girl Without a Name by Sandra Block

This is the second psychological suspense medical thriller featuring Dr. Zoe Goldman. She is in her last year of residency as a psychiatrist, and on probation, trying to help her patients as best she can. She’s especially taken with the young girl who has been brought into the psych ward of the Children’s Hospital not knowing who she is or how she got there. She may actually have a name, but it could be Candy or Daneesha, or something else.

Zoe herself, suffers from ADHD and doesn’t think her Adderall is working well enough. She tries to keep others from knowing about the ADHD, which could hinder her work. In fact, in this world of off-balance people, some are more out of kilter than others, but none are normal, whatever that means.

The handsome but married Dr. Berringer is supervising Zoe and complications arise on that front. A fellow resident named Jason is her friend, but teases her and sometimes gets too close to her secret. Her brother Scotty is a breath of fresh air and normalcy, contrasting with the patients, all of whom are severely mentally ill, and the doctors. Zoe is determined to get to the bottom of who Jane Doe is and, after she discovers that, how to find the ones responsible for her condition. As she defies her superiors to help the girl, not only her career hangs in the balance, but her relationship with the love of her life, Mike, who is considering leaving her for a job in another state.

I loved entering this strange place, where people don’t know who they are, or pretend they’re someone else, to try to get to sanity. It’s a very strong second book and I’m looking forward to the third.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Death in the Time of Ice for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "Death at the Abbey" by Christine Trent (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Today Kaye George delves into a historical mystery set in 1869. Death at the Abbey by Christine Trent is the fifth book in the A Lady Of Ashes Mystery Series which began with Lady Of Ashes.

Death at the Abbey by Christine Trent

This delightful historical mystery captured me on the first page and never let go. I know that description is used a lot, but it’s very true for this book.

Violet Harper, a series character, is a female undertaker in London in 1869. She and her husband Sam are in North Nottinghamshire and have been for four weeks while he tried to get a coal mine started. He’s having trouble finding enough workers because the 5th Duke of Portland routinely employs hundreds of locals for building projects on his property, Welbeck Abbey. When the Duke’s valet, Pearson, shows up and requests that she come to the estate on a mission that he can’t seem to state coherently, she raises a few objections, but ends up going. It turns out that she is being asked to prepare a raven for burial!

Her ministrations are interrupted, though. Things continue to get weirder and weirder, as first one worker, then another are found dead. Violet knows they’ve been murdered, but can’t convince anyone else of this. Sam gets invited to demonstrate the new technique of dynamite blasting for the underground tunnels, ballroom, chapel, unused guestrooms, and such that the Duke is having constructed, so he’s on the scene eventually. No one ever uses the ballroom, the chapel, or the many beautifully decorated guestrooms. I got a kick out of the continuously roasting chickens, too.

The Duke was presented as such an oddball, I had to look him up. A detailed Author’s Note in the back also gives information on him and other actual historical people and places that are used in the story. From the light research I did, that Duke was even stranger than portrayed here!

Seemingly disconnected deaths and other happenings keep occurring, but the author masterfully tied everything together in the end to create a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Eine Kleine Murder, for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: "The Widow” by Fiona Barton

It is a crime filled Monday as this week Kaye George reviews The Widow by Fiona Barton….

“The Widow” by Fiona Barton

This crime novel meanders between quite a few points of view, and different points in time, but the story is only enriched by the style, never confused. The reader is always eager to get back to the next step.

There is The Widow, who is the central character, of course. Her husband has just died and she’s playing the grieving widow, but we learn immediately that she feels relief because he’s gone and there will be no more of what she calls “his nonsense.”

The story starts in 2010 with the death of the widow’s husband, a man who has been hounded by the police and the press for the last three years because of the crime everyone suspects her husband committed back in 2006, where part of the story also takes place. The detective, DI Bob Sparkes, and the reporter, Kate Waters, give their thoughts on the case, on the suspect, Glen Taylor, and his wife, Jean.

The beautiful child, Bella, has been missing since October of 2006 when she was snatched from her yard while her mother, Dawn Elliot, left her there for what she always insists was just a few minutes. By 2007, Glen Taylor was a serious suspect for her kidnapping. The mother, Dawn, tells part of the story, too. She believes her daughter is still alive after all this time and keeps the story before the public as much as she can. After Glen Taylor is killed in a traffic accident, Dawn and the others despair of ever learning where Bella is, either alive or dead. The only hope is The Widow, who might know something. She does, in fact, know quite a bit more.

The tension and intrigue will take hold of you, draw you in, and not let you go until the climactic end.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Eine Kleine Murder, for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: "Out of the Blues" by Trudy Nan Boyce (Reviewed by Kaye George)

This Monday finds Kaye George reviewing a police procedural that also has some romance. If Out of the Blues by Trudy Nan Boyce does not seem what you are looking for, surf back in time by way of previous “Monday With Kaye” blogs to look for your next read as Kaye has recommended plenty of reads here these past 16 months.

 

Out of the Blues by Trudy Nan Boyce

Detective Salt, short for Sarah Alt, lives in a gritty world. But the police procedure alternates with a gentle romance. I loved the behind-the-scenes glimpses scattered throughout the story.

Salt’s father’s suicide when she was ten casts a long shadow on her present-day life. She wears his actual trench coat, lives in his house with his music tapes and his books on depression. The tapes are blues tapes; the books, of course, are about the blues. And Salt has recently left behind the blue uniform of a beat cop, so the title is a neat multi-layered pun.

As a new detective, she undergoes a hazing of sorts, that she has to work through in order to do her job. Her first case is a cold one, the death of a blues musician who may have been given an intentional “hot” dose. She works through stupid rookie mistakes and false starts, only to end up in her old beat neighborhood, The Homes, in Atlanta, looking for clues and a resolution to the case.

Off the job, we meet Wonder, her dog, and Pepper her former police partner and present sparring partner. We also enter her dreams, where dogs figure prominently and cases may even be solved.

This debut novel is a different sort of police story—one I think you’ll enjoy.

Reviewed by Kaye George, author of Death in the Time of Ice, for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: “Missing Pieces” by Heather Gudenkauf (Reviewed by Kaye George)

“Monday With Kaye” continues this week with a mystery/suspense novel by a NYT bestselling author.

“Missing Pieces” by Heather Gudenkauf

This is a novel of suspense and mystery within a family that may not be what it seems.

Sarah Quinlan has a stable life and a happy marriage in Larkspur Lake, Montana, with her husband and their daughters, who are off at college. She writes an advice column called Dear Astrid to keep her hand in journalism. They haven’t felt the need to even leave Montana for years.

Sarah accompanies her husband Jack home to Penny Gate, Minneapolis, to see his elderly Aunt Julia after she’s taken a fall and is in bad shape. He hasn’t been home for twenty years. Sarah welcomes the chance to finally meet the family Jack has told her so little of. She wants to learn more about his early childhood, his parents’ deaths, and what his relatives are like.

The family dynamics are uncomfortable from the start and she feels everyone is hiding something from her. Jack, she realizes, has been avoiding going home. Why? She’s missing information the rest of the Quinlans seem to know. Little by little, the missing pieces appear, but don’t seem to fit together. In fact, the more she learns, the more confused she is, until she doesn’t quite know who the man she married actually is, or what he’s done in the past. She doubts the little she thought she knew about Jack’s family—and him. Her journalist instincts take over and she puts herself on the trail of Jack’s story, whoever he is, until she realizes someone may be aiming for her. She must find out if she’s been living a lie and, if she has, who can she do about it?

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of “Eine Kleine Murder, for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: "Wicked Lies" by Lisa Jackson (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Kaye George starts us off on this first Monday in May with another Thriller Monday. Instead of being manic, read a book. 

Wicked Lies by Lisa Jackson

This suspense thriller, written by sisters Lisa Jackson and Nancy Bush, is the fourth in their series dealing with The Colony. Called Siren Song by the Oregon locals, or sometimes just 'the cult,' The Colony is a fortified compound where a group of half-sisters live under the strict rule of Catherine, their aunt. Some of the sisters have escaped into the real world.

Among them is Laura Adderly. She's gone through nursing school and married a doctor. She would be a success story, except that she's divorced from Byron, the doctor, and has just found out that she's pregnant by her ex as a result of a last minute reconciliation attempt. She's also finding out that her demented half-brother, Justice Turnbull, who wants to kill all the sisters, is now able to smell her. It seems he can easily detect the presence of pregnant relatives. Laura had immediately grown attached to the small life inside her and is determined to defend herself and her baby against the monster that Justice has grown to be.

Laura is armed with something more than her determination. All the sisters have been born with different 'gifts' and Laura has two. When Justice's thoughts invade her mind, she can put up a mental wall and block him out. The converse of that is that she can send her thoughts into his mind. Her second gift occurs sporadically, but has been a  help in her nursing career. Sometimes she can touch a person and diagnose medical disorders, even predict fatal conditions and death.

Justice is incarcerated from brutal murders that happened twenty years ago, but his ego-maniac, know-it-all psychiatrist is tricked by the wily killer and allows Justice to escape prison after severely wounding him and a guard. Now Justice is free to rampage through the Deception Bay area, killing as he goes, and threatening to annihilate every relative, every sisssterrrr, as he hisses into Laura's mind. A disgraced reporter, Harrison Frost, bent on redeeming himself by getting the story on Justice, through Laura, gets more involved with her than he intends. This excellent tale will keep you reading on the very edge of your seat. Be prepared for some late nights since it's over five hundred pages long.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Choke, for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "Threat Warning" by John Gilstrap (Reviewed by Kaye George)

This Monday author Kaye George brings news of a thriller that could be all too real…

 

Threat Warning by John Gilstrap

There’s no need to wonder how Gilstrap gets the rave reviews and best-selling status that he gets. Just start reading and it all becomes clear.

A bizarre group calling themselves “The Army of God,” and calling each other Brother-This and Sister-That, have a secret goal so lofty it’s worth killing for. At least in their minds it is. The story opens with young Colleen Devlin preparing to mow down motorists on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac during the afternoon rush hour. She’s at one end of the bridge and Brother Stephen is at the other end.

Jonathan Grave is driving across the bridge at the moment they open fire, stuck in traffic, chatting with his friend and passenger, Father Dom D’Angelo. Jonathan instantly recognizes the sound of an automatic weapon, creeps out of his car, and whips out his Colt .45. Although he hits the shooter in the chest, she runs away just as he realizes she’s a female and not a young man. A misguided Secret Service agent gets the drop on Jonathan, thinking he’s the perpetrator, and both shooters escape detection.

Colleen commandeers a minivan for her getaway and, in the process, takes the driver and her teenage son hostage to a mountain hideout. The Army of God is well-organized and supremely motivated, but their captives, the wife, and son of a deployed Delta force operative, and their opponent, Jonathan Grave himself, are formidable. Grave and his team watch as other fatal mass attacks are carried out across America. They struggle to get to the people behind the carnage that continues splashing blood and leaving bodies across the country before even greater havoc ensues.

Hang on, it’s a wild ride!

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Choke for Suspense Magazine
 

Monday With Kaye: "The Stages" by Thom Satterlee

While the quote on the back of the print edition The Stages by Thom Satterlee is attributed to Suspense Magazine the text quoted comes from Kaye George’s review below as Kaye gets us started off on another week….

The Stages by Thom Satterlee

Within a few pages, I fell in love with this book. It has a most unusual sleuth. Daniel loves pastries and Kierkegaard, misses Mette, his mentor who has been murdered, and is a person with Asperger’s. I personally would define him as moderately severely autistic. He is functioning, but has a tough time relating to people. This is not helped by being an American working in Denmark, one who understands but does not speak Danish.

Mette, who was his girlfriend many years ago, was most recently his boss at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen. She was diligently working on his people skills and he recalls them as he works to find out who killed Mette. Daniel has found out the most about himself, however, through his studies of Kierkegaard, who may have been afflicted much as Daniel is.

The police officer investigating the case, Ingrid Bendtner, asks Daniel to be a mole at the Center to find out who the killer is and who has stolen a valuable newly discovered manuscript. Through Daniel’s tangents, typical for people like him, we find out much about Kierkegaard, but also a lot about his own condition.

The mystery is structured in Stages, which has a particular meaning to students of Kierkegaard. This novel was an ambitious undertaking and couldn’t have been done better.
 

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Death in the Time of Ice, for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "The Rhythm of the August Rain" by Gillian Royes (Reviewed by Kaye George)

It is April and here that means there is rain as opposed to August where there is often not a drop of rain to be had. According to Kaye George The Rhythm of the August Rain is not at all about Texas in August. As a native Texan, I figured that out just from the title.

The Rhythm of the August Rain by Gillian Royes

This is an intriguing tale of friendship between two men from very different cultures who are together in the exotic setting of Largo Bay, Jamaica. Largo Bay is fictitious, but I have the feeling that the Jamaica in this book is the real thing.

Eric came to Largo Bay from the New York with grand plans for a hotel. Shad was already there, a native, and helped build the hotel. The hotel, never having made the profit Eric hoped for, has been destroyed by a storm and stands on the island near the shabby bar he and Shad now operate. There are some hopeful plans to develop the property.

Simone, a talented photographer whom Eric once thought was the love of his life, is coming to Largo Bay in July to do a story on Rastafarians. This turns out to be a lot more risky than one would think. They do not like people investigating them, and especially do not like to be photographed during their rituals. However, Shannon, Eric’s ex-girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Eve, is also arriving soon. Meanwhile, Shad is being pressured by Beth, the mother of his four children, to make it legal with a real wedding.

Eric makes some discoveries about himself and it’s fun to make them with him. There is a bit of a mystery about an old killing that Shannon manages to do some detecting on, even though Shad is supposed to be a detective. The developing relationship between Eric and his daughter is well done. But the best part of this book is the Jamaican setting and the Rastas, their history and culture.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Death in the Time of Ice for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "The Pyramid of Doom" by Andy McDermott

Kaye George kicks off the first Monday in April with a review of a book that, surprising, has nothing at all to do with the IRS or the 15^th…

The Pyramid of Doom by Andy McDermott

Dr. Nina Wilde, with the help of her British husband, Eddie Chase, continues to astound archeologists, and the world, by uncovering yet another unknown treasure. This one leads to the possibility of the existence of the fabled Pyramid of Osiris and a conspiracy the goes far beyond archeology.

We are introduced to college student Macy Sharif, who is bored with her summer job on the project in Egypt, even though, in just eight days, the leader of the expedition promises to reveal the existence of the Hall of Records, long thought to be mythological, amid international television hoopla. Her boredom vanished when she realizes some of the project members, even the leaders, are plotting to remove treasures without the knowledge of the International Heritage Agency sponsors. Macy, a fresh and engaging character, turns out to be resourceful as well, when she escapes from the thugs who are inexplicably trying to kill her. She appeals to her idol, Dr. Nina Wilde, the discoverer of Atlantis, for help. Nina, who has been suffering from depression after being "suspended" from IHA because of her disgrace in the Garden of Eden disaster, meets with Macy in a New York coffee shop called 52 Perk Up, and they're off!

A quest to uncover the secrets of an Osiris cult leads to a romp from Egypt to Paris, on to Switzerland, and even Monaco. A handsome, vacuous action movie star, Grant Thorn, gets mixed up in the adventure, along with a pair of murderous Egyptian brothers who have their own ideas about the legends of the gods Osiris and Set, and an American named Bobby Diamondback who favors snakeskin jackets. This eventually ties in with a plot that could kill millions.

The car chases and shoot-outs go on a little too long and are sometimes a little too contrived for this reader, but fans of Nina and ex-SAS bodyguard Eddie, will certainly expect them and will willingly suspend disbelief.

Amid the action and double-crossing shoot-em-up excitement, are the serious themes dealing with the relationship of Nina and Eddie, Nina's suffering self-esteem, and Macy's voyage of self-discovery. And, most satisfying for the fans of this series, the future is left up in the air at the end. Another wild ride is surely coming right up!

Reviewed by Kaye George for Suspense Magazine

Monday With Kaye: "The Look of Love" by Mary Jane Clark (Reviewed by Kaye George)

This last Monday in March brings us a mystery read.  The Look of Love by Mary Jane Clark is the second of a four book series that began with To Have and To Kill. If this one does not appeal make sure you check out the other suggestions Kaye George has made previous weeks. I am sure you will find at least one if not many more to consider.

The Look of Love by Mary Jane Clark

Piper Donovan is making her second wedding cake, this time in L.A. Jillian Abernathy, daughter of a famous plastic surgeon and an equally famous model/actress, fiancée of Ben Dixon, M.D., and director of the Elysium Spa, saw the cake Piper designed in the last book and wants to pay Piper's airfare and put her up at the spa with all its amenities in exchange for a one-of-a-kind cake.

It sounds like just what Piper needs, time away from the handsome FBI agent on the East Coast while she figures out her feelings for him, plus the stay in the exclusive resort. There's a problem, though. Someone has just attacked Jillian's maid with acid in the face, an attack undoubtedly meant for Jillian. This doesn't stop Piper. Away she goes, right into the thick of things.

The story opens on New Year's Eve. The unusually short chapters, some only a page long, bounce between Jillian, her sister who is now a cloistered nun, Piper, the injured maid, an ambitious reporter hot of the trail of a big story at the spa, Jack (the FBI agent who would like to be more than friends), and others. The action races toward the wedding day, two weeks off, as things continue to go wrong--and then there's the murder. It seems more and more impossible that the rites will take place. Piper is also auditioning for an advertising spot while she's there. And missing Jack more than she thought she would.

This is a fast, light read that holds your interest throughout every page.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Choke, for Suspense Magazine