She Smiled Sweetly: A Poppy Rice Mystery [Hardcover]

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2004

The intrepid Poppy Rice is back with not one but two cases, separated by thirty years but connected by DNA

When the body of a young pregnant woman washes ashore on a stretch of barren beach at Boston Harbor, homicide detective Rocky Patel writes to FBI agent Poppy Rice for help in identifying the Jane Doe. The crime lab comes up empty, but a year and a half later an anonymous tip to the Boston PD reveals the woman to be the wayward daughter of a prominent Irish American political family.
In a separate case, more than thirty years earlier, a pregnant woman's corpse had been discovered on the Irish island of Inishmore. A group of women secretly buried the body but saved a lock of the dead girl's hair, which is just now passed along to Poppy. She agrees to set up a DNA test, which soon confirms her gut feeling that the two drownings are somehow linked-and that foul play is involved.
Teaming up with the inimitable Rocky, Poppy sets out in search of truth and justice and instead finds herself snared in a web of political deceit, family intrigue, and out-and-out bad guys. As always, she rises to the occasion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blend literary brilliance with outstanding mystery writing, stir in a bit of political intrigue and you get a surefire winner, Smith's third book to feature D.C.–based FBI agent Poppy Rice (after 2003's She's Not There). Poppy agrees to help a friend's mom find closure in the case of the death of a pregnant woman in her native Ireland during the 1970s, but before you can say "Erin go bragh," the body of another pregnant young woman with an Irish link washes up on a beach in Boston Harbor. Police detective and Hindu/Catholic Rocky Patel heads the Beantown investigation of the American victim, and his coolness and wisdom complement Poppy's no-nonsense professionalism. When the corpse gets a name, her family ties prove to be political powerhouses—including connections clear to the White House—and one relative appears to be dirty in more ways than one. Was the dead woman this family's bad seed, or contaminated by someone truly evil? Her sister pronounces the latter, and in doing so, reveals a cancer that has spread far beyond the cells of her own family. In a plot that takes Poppy's crime fighters on a desperate chase across the country and beyond, the action concludes in a heart-hammering climax. Smith shines in this superb whodunit.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The body of a pregnant young woman is found in brackish water on a beach near Boston Harbor. FBI agent Poppy Rice, a crime lab specialist, is assigned to help identify the victim. At roughly the same time, an Irish emigre firefighter (and one of Rice's former love interests) pleads with Rice to run DNA testing on a strand of hair from another pregnant young woman, but this victim was found off the coast of Ireland 30 years earlier. DNA testing must be performed in the U.S. since Ireland bans the recovery of DNA from a corpse. This third mystery starring Agent Poppie Rice is especially strong on delivering fascinating crime lab expertise in a nonintrusive, nonshowy way. Agent Rice, a deft mix of careful scientist and daring speculator, connects the two cases to an intrigue that reaches back three decades. A well-constructed puzzle. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (June 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805072241
• ISBN-13: 978-0805072242
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,003,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I have lived all my life in Connecticut except for the two years I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. Presently, I write from my crow's nest in East Haven, breaking periodically to ride the rails from New Haven to New York where I do enjoy the city lights. I have two children, Jene, an RN at Yale-New Haven's clinics, and Jere, who has had a blog since 2004: A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory (http://letsgosox.blogspot.com) Not only does he cover Red Sox lore and stats, he reviews my books--when he's not co-writing them with me i.e. DIRTY WATER: A RED SOX MYSTERY.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not nearly as good as I hoped it would be. . . as usual, July 6, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Hogg (Mason, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: She Smiled Sweetly: A Poppy Rice Mystery (Hardcover)

I checked this book out from the library for some summer fun reading. I've not read the first two books in the series, but the blurb made it look interesting and I am a true sucker for female detective fiction. I won't go into detail about the plot, but simply put it involves the drownings of two young women that take place thirty years and two continents apart. Poppy Rice, FBI Agent extraordinaire (apparently, since she doesn't seem to have to follow any standard FBI procedures)is asked to investigate both -the older one by a friend and his mother from Ireland and the more recent one by her boss (whose position at the FBI is never really defined). Her investigation leads to a web of incest, family cover-up, priestly misconduct and then . . . not much more.

It's too bad, because there were moments in this book where I was really interested. The incest plotline was compelling and the characters in the family were well defined. I wanted to know more about them and how they would handle the fallout. Unfortunately, the plot switched almost immediately to the priest and the pretty much unbelievable solution to the crimes - and the rest of the book is just a waste of time and words.

I used to think that you had to be really famous to publish a book without any input from an editor (Martha Grimes and Patricia Cornwell I'm talking to you!!). But now it is obvious to me that most editors must be asleep at the wheel.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And I smiled along with her (when I wasn't being shocked), June 21, 2004

By 

Sarrah Knight (Iowa, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: She Smiled Sweetly: A Poppy Rice Mystery (Hardcover)

Back from a failed vacation, Poppy Rice is summoned by an Irish-Catholic fire marshall to look into a thirty-year-old death by drowning in Ireland. Poppy becomes entirely engrossed in the case when she recognizes the parallels between the Irish case and the case of an Irish-American girl who drowned in Boston just a year and a half before. Teamed up with Rocky Patel, a Boston homicide cop, for the American case, Poppy digs into the troubled history of the Boston girl, and unearths tragedies neither her family nor the elite community in which they exist want exposed. Strangely enough, a DNA match links the two girls, despite the time span and the distance between their deaths. Poppy uncovers a tale of child molestation, prostitution, and a Catholic sense of shame and faith.

Poppy is back in full-force, and the constant on-edge feeling the reading gives is more in-tune with the promise of the first book in the series, Love Her Madly. Poppy is a character who, though perhaps a little distant, is very open about her life and with her opinions. The book is so well-written that the reader, though puzzled about some of the things Poppy says along the way, comes to understand exactly what she meant. Tense, fast-paced, and witty, this is a series worth the time.