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Summary
Summary
Martha Grimes returns to her twelve-year-old heroine, Emma Graham, in this suspenseful sequel to the bestselling Belle Ruin. Emma continues her investigation into the strange disappearance of the four- month-old Slade baby from the Belle Ruin Hotel more than twenty years before. The sudden appearance in town of the baby's father, Morris Slade, makes her even more determined to learn the truth. Then a mysterious drifter named Ralph Diggs appears at the Hotel Paradise, looking for work, ingratiating himself with everyone there. Everyone, that is, except Emma. The perceptive Emma is bound once again to delight fans of the previous books Hotel Paradise, Cold Flat Junction, and Belle Ruin, and certain to win new readers with her intuition and humor.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A 20-year-old kidnapping with faint echoes of the Lindbergh case drives Grimes's convoluted fourth crime novel featuring Emma Graham, a direct sequel to 2005's Belle Ruin. Emma, a 12-year-old cub reporter who also helps out at the Hotel Paradise in La Porte, Md., where her mother's the cook, thinks that the accounts don't add up about the unsolved disappearance of Baby Fay Slade from the nearby Belle Rouen hotel. Emma's doubts center on the possible role of Fay's father, the shady Morris Slade; Morris's spoiled wife; his rich father-in-law; and his former neighbors. The abrupt reappearance of Morris Slade and the arrival of a smug new hotel employee raise further questions and end in sudden death. Grimes's strength is in her appealing characters, from the inquisitive Emma and her dipsomaniac great-aunt, Aurora, to the pretentious 16-year-old Ree-Jane Davidow and philosophical auto mechanic Dwayne, but gaps in logic, lack of red herrings, and frequent references to earlier entries in the series may put off some readers, especially those unfamiliar with the previous books. 4-city author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The latest installment in the endless carnival of crime at sleepy La Porte, Md., involves still another return to the storied past.Now that she's untangled the mystery of exactly which members of the Queen family killed which other members (Cold Flat Junction, 2001), Belle Ruin waitress/cub reporter Emma Graham, 12, is confronted by an even more vexing case: the disappearance 20 years ago of Baby Fay from the loving embrace of Morris and Imogen Slade. Or not exactly, since the infant was being minded, not very vigilantly, by babysitter Gloria Spiker, who returned from an extended phone conversation with Prunella Rice to find her charge gone. The setup echoed that of the famous Lindbergh kidnapping, right down to the telltale ladder, but there was never a ransom demand, and never a sign of Baby Fay since then. Rumor has long maintained that Imogen's father, Lucien Woodruff, kept the police investigation at bay for the first crucial hours, presumably in order to conceal some family secret. Now Emma, provoked alike by kleptomaniac spinster Isabel Barnett's claim to have seen Baby Fay after the abduction and the recent return of Morris Slade to town, is determined to get at the truth. Other 12-year-olds would be daunted, but Emma, who's already confronted armed killers and survived her brother's production of Medea, the Musical, methodically begins interviewing possible suspects, who just happen to be her friends and neighbors, and pondering possibilities. Is Baby Fay still alive, or was she killed in the course of the kidnapping, like the Lindbergh child? Did the kidnappers somehow lose her? Was she a changeling whose fate was intertwined with that of some other baby, or a hallucination of Isabel Barnett's? Was there a conspiracy to cover up the real facts of her disappearance? In fact, how many people actually saw her at Belle Ruin?Emma is as enchanting as the eccentric cast of her hometown.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Emma Graham, last seen in the disappointing Belle Ruin (2005), returns to better form in this latest episode in Grimes' series starring the precocious 12-year-old sleuth. Emma, a cub reporter for the Conservative, is nearly finished telling the serialized story of her harrowing experience in The Tragedy at Spirit Lake. She's distracted, though, by questions surrounding the disappearance of Baby Fay 20 years prior. The sudden arrival of two people the baby's father and drifter Ralph Diggs piques her curiosity. Diggs wins the hearts of everyone in town, except Emma, who manages to put herself in considerable danger as she searaches for the truth about Baby Fay. Emma is not without her charms (especially when she's hiding empty rum bottles on her great aunt's behalf or outwitting a dim-witted sheriff's deputy), but to enjoy her adventures, readers must suspend considerable disbelief to accept the idea of a 12-year-old who displays far more savvy than most adults. That hurdle crossed, however, this is an agreeable thriller from a seasoned hand. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grimes' Richard Jury novels sell better than this series, but there will be more than enough spillover to generate requests in public libraries.--Wilkens, Mary Frances Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
It's getting harder and harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys in a modern western, of which Urban Waite's first novel, THE TERROR OF LIVING (Little, Brown, $24.99), is one fine specimen. Phil Hunt, thoughtfully described as "a good man, made up of all the bad things in the world," did a 10-year stretch in prison for killing a shopkeeper during a dumb robbery. But this flawed man was rescued by a strong woman who became his wife, and in the 20 years that Hunt has been out, they've made a quiet, decent life together on a small farm south of Seattle where they raise and board horses. The thing is, Hunt can't make a living without doing a little drug smuggling on the side. "It's not all cigarette boats and fancy parties," he tells a new recruit, referred to only as "the kid," while they make their laborious way up a mountain trail on packhorses to collect a delivery being dropped from a small plane. But their scheme is ruined by another good man, Deputy Bobby Drake, whose father, a former sheriff, is serving time for doing exactly what Hunt is doing. The kid is caught, the drugs are lost and, although Hunt manages to escape, he's now in deep trouble. You probably think you know where this story is going: Hunt will try to make up the loss by taking on a dangerous assignment that will go terribly wrong. A hired killer will be dispatched both to retrieve the goods, which are somewhere in the intestinal tract of a Vietnamese drug mule, and to get rid of Hunt. And be assured that Deputy Drake, still trying to prove he's a better man than his father, will show up to lend more drama to the manhunt. While Waite delivers the story you expect, he does it with more artistry than would seem possible in a conventional thriller. His descriptions of the stark beauty of the mountains have a calming effect on the intensity of the cinematic action scenes. And the surprising delicacy of the writing also makes it easier to bear the raw violence done to man and beast. Waite is most eloquent when he's probing the interior lives of the men locked in this contest of will and endurance. One minute it's Hunt, turning over memories of his prison days. Then it's Drake, remembering his father's face in the "church light filtering down through a patchwork of green forest branches." No matter who fails to survive, these characters all deserve to be mourned. On Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing more than 30 people and wounding hundreds. While that act of terrorism was never solved, Jed Rubenfeld gives it quite a good shot in his new thriller, THE DEATH INSTINCT (Riverhead, $26.95). There's real life in the street scenes, and historical figures like Mayor John F. Hylan, United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and the F.B.I. director William J. Flynn figure credibly in the ingeniously plotted investigation conducted by Rubenfeld's fictional detectives, Stratham Younger, a physician, lover and fighter of heroic proportions, and his down-to-earth partner, Jimmy Littlemore, a New York police officer. Being something of an overachiever, Rubenfeld doesn't allow his sleuths to stop once they've solved the bomb mystery. They must also thwart an assault on the Treasury, stop the industrial misuse of radium, travel to Vienna for a consultation with Sigmund Freud and avert a war between the United States and Mexico. For their next adventure, perhaps they should go looking for Judge Crater and, while they're at it, solve the mystery of life. Let a little boy out of your sight and he'll get into mischief. Take your eyes off a little girl and she's liable to turn into a detective - maybe an adorable snoop like Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine of A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD (Delacorte, $23) and two previous mysteries by the Canadian writer Alan Bradley. Given the run of the family's decrepit English estate by her widowed father and uncaring older sisters, Flavia has found sanctuary in the long-abandoned laboratory built by a Victorian ancestor. By applying the scientific knowledge she's acquired from reading authors like Pliny ("who had written some ripping stuff about poisons"), this precocious child confounds her elders by solving a bundle of crimes: the murder of a poacher, the disappearance of an infant, a brutal attack on an old Gypsy woman, and a string of thefts and forgeries of antiques. Even if Flavia's credibility as a sleuth diminishes with each turn of this tongue-in-cheek plot, she remains irresistibly appealing as a little girl lost. FADEAWAY GIRL (Viking, $26.95) may not be the ideal introduction to the adventures of 12-year-old Emma Graham, since the plot is too complicated to follow if you're not familiar with previous books in the semi-autobiographical series Martha Grimes has set in some nostalgic post-World War II time warp. Constant readers, however, should relish the latest chapter in Emma's efforts to unearth the secrets of the little town in western Maryland where her mother runs the decaying Hotel Paradise. Drawn by her runaway imagination to investigate crimes that have become part of local legend, Emma uses sheer cunning and devious methods of interrogation to pry information from the colorful characters she finds at well-trafficked spots like the Rainbow Cafe. They all quicken to life under Grimes's Dickensian touch, but none more so than Emma. She may keep losing herself in the past, but she's far too vital to fade away. The hero of Urban Waite's Western crime novel can't make a living without doing a little drug smuggling.
