Amazon.com Review
With eight Regency romances and one fairly well-received mystery/thriller, 1999's
Sunflower, under her belt, Martha Powers returns with her second single-mom-saving-self-and-child-from-nameless-faceless-fiend page-turner,
Bleeding Heart. And that's a good thing.
Following the untimely death of her philandering husband, Maggie Collier and her 8-year old son, Jake, trade the hubbub of Chicago for the idyll that is Delbrook, Wisconsin. Idyllic, yes, until the stabbing death of Jake's beloved grandpa, George, and the anything-but-idyllic suspicion that the murderer is a close friend of George's (and everyone else in town) who will kill again to keep from being unmasked as the aforementioned fiend, The Warrior. The photos George had passed around the poker table, shot by Jake at Delbrook's Renaissance Fair, plainly showed 4-year-old Tyler McKenzie, the latest in a string of The Warrior's kidnap victims. Hence George's demise and the likelihood that Maggie and Jake could be next.
The poker-playing chief of police and most of the other townspeople are sure the murder is the work of Tully Jackson, a homeless derelict seen crouching over George just moments after his ventilation. Maggie is not convinced, however, and with the help of Tyler's uncle Grant (a handsome young lawyer who had gotten a tip that Tyler had been spotted in Delbrook) and a trusted pair of aged and eccentric citizens, Maggie and Co. go about the business of solving the crime or crimes before it's too late.
It's stock characters meets plots-r-us and, mysteriously enough, a doozy of a read. Ms. Powers keeps it flowing nicely, accessorizes her off-the-rack cast to a fare-thee-well, and does a fine job of keeping the reader paging back and forth, rechecking names, dates and alibis because, after all, no Delbrooker, upstanding or otherwise, could have conceivably committed the heinous crimes revealed. And there's the fun of it: one of them did. --Michael Hudson
From Publishers Weekly
Every family's worst nightmare haunts Powers's latest thriller (after Sunflower), in which toddler Tyler McKenzie is snatched from a Cleveland department store. Eighteen months later, in a seemingly unrelated incident, an elderly Wisconsin man named George Collier is stabbed to death at his country club. Local police conclude that a neighborhood vagrant, Tully Jackson, killed George in a botched robbery attempt, but George's widowed daughter-in-law, Maggie, is unconvinced, since Tully is gentle, kind, and a friend of Maggie's young son, Jake. When handsome Chicago lawyer Grant Holbrook shows up looking for George, he's unaware the man is dead, but after he reveals that George, at his country club, passed around some photos of the missing child, the connection is made: the night George showed the photos, he was killed. Grant is Tyler's uncle, tipped off by a mutual friend that the old man may have stumbled onto the missing boy's whereabouts. The question is: which of George's country club cronies saw those incriminating photosAand will that person next harm Maggie, GrantAor Jake? Powers populates the town of Delbrook, Wis., with memorably off-kilter types, smiling folk who sport tiny "bleeding heart" tattoos and a creepy penchant for eagle feathers. Though Maggie and Grant's meeting is impossibly cute (she whacks him in the head with a canoe paddle), they develop into likably cranky amateur sleuths, obviously destined for romance. But the hyperactive plot, strained resolution and frequently stilted dialogue will remind readers that Powers's nightmare is a far cry from real life. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
