Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. 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. 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.
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. 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. Sure to be a bestseller, but the guy’s phoning it in.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī 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. He writes as if he imagines his typical reader to be a business traveler staring down a long layover. Baldacci himself seems only partly engaged in the task here. Scooby-Doo had villains more complicated than these distinctive quirks of the characters, such as one wearing 19th-century clothing, make them only mildly interesting. Baldacci is not a particularly graceful writer, e.g., “Like all Secret Service agents, his suits were designed a little big in the chest, to disguise the bulge of the weapon.” Worse is the author’s chronic inability to draw convincing characters. Throughout, Baldacci ( Hour Game, 2004, etc.) drops reliable twists, revealing the federal agent murder to be-surprise-a minuscule piece of a much bigger plot involving snipers, nukes, a presidential kidnapping and an even gloomier vision of the future. Thus the author’s bleak imagining of the near future.
Rocket-propelled grenades have pierced the White House, there’s been another prison fiasco in Afghanistan, a dozen soldiers are dying every day and the war has opened a new front on the Syrian border. A lukewarm would-be potboiler of uninvolving intrigue about a kooky quartet of conspiracy theorists-one by the name of “Oliver Stone”-who witness the murder of a federal agent.Īlmost 8,000 Americans have died in attacks on U.S.
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