From Publishers Weekly
Clark's second thriller (after Do You Want to Know a Secret?) again features the world of broadcast media. Farrell Slater, the 38-year-old producer of the highly rated, New York-based news show KEY Evening Headlines, is in a slump. Unless she proves she can still break a big story, she'll be out of a job when her contract expires. Her last chance may be a seemingly dull assignment to cover the auction of the famed Faberg? Moon Egg, lost for decades following the Russian Revolution and now mysteriously rediscovered. After the Romanov treasure sells for a record $6 million, Farrell receives a tip from an unexpected source who claims that the egg sold at auction is a fake and that the Imperial bauble is still at large. Meanwhile, an artisan is brutally murdered in his workshop in Little Odessa, and as the hunt for the egg heats up, more deaths follow in quick succession. With her cameraman at her side and an attractive FBI man on her heels, Farrell is plunged into a world of high-end auction houses, Faberg? history and Romanov lore, all at the breakneck pace of TV journalism. The suspense never flags, and the killer's identity remains a secret long into the tale. Clark may skimp on character development, and dialogue is regrettably stiff, but for those who can't get enough of the competitively backbiting world of network news, this novel offers entertaining verisimilitude. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A second trip to KEY Evening Headlines (Do You Want to Know a Secret?, 1998) discloses another intrigue and an equally imperiled single career-woman. Two such women, in fact, if you count Patricia Devereaux, the consignment-shop owner whose inquisitive son Peter discovers that an elderly Russian emigre named Olga, who's placed many lovely items with Pat over the years, is still in possession of one last treasure: the Moon Egg, a Faberg creation for the Romanovs that opens to reveal a comet-shaped spray of diamonds. Peter's glimpse of the Moon Egg would have been exciting under any circumstances; what makes it mind-boggling is that New York's Churchill Auction House has just announced the sale of their own Moon Egg, sans diamonds, to an anonymous buyer for $6 million. When Peter tells KEY news producer Farrell Slater, his mom's old friend, about Olga's egg, Farrell, who's known she was on her way out of KEY ever since executive producer Range Bullock declined to air her report on the Churchill sale, senses the story of her Emmy-laden career. Even as Pat is reluctantly bringing Churchill's purchaser, retired prima ballerina Nadine Paradise, together with Olga, Farrell is laboring to prove that the Moon Egg Nadine bought is a fake, and that Churchill president Clifford Montgomery knew it was. Working as a tag team, the two plucky heroines aren't in time to prevent several murders, but it isn't giving too much away to say that in the double-quick march from Ash Wednesday to Easter, they help unmask the perps, save Farrell's job, and find a bit of romance in a world studded with diverting subplots and enough reassuringly predictable character types to give Brighton Beach and Westwood, New Jersey, their own votes in Congress. Just the bauble to keep fans of Mary You-Know-Who Clark efficiently entertained while they're waiting for the next installment from the author's ex-mother-in-law. --
Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
