Tomorrow's Vengeance

July 14, 2014
Calvert Colony, an upscale Annapolis, Md., retirement community, provides the setting for Talley’s nicely textured 13th Hannah Ives mystery (after 2013’s Dark Passage). Retired mystery writer Nadine Smith Gray, who owns a town house in Calvert Colony, persuades Hannah to volunteer in the complex’s memory care unit. The people Hannah meets include a Muslim couple, beautiful Safa Abaza and her mercurial husband, Masud; bigoted Col. Nate Greene; and concentration camp survivor Ysabelle Milanesi. When Hannah discovers the body of a resident in a decorative rowboat in the community garden, she lends Det. Ron Powers a hand in winnowing the surprisingly large field of suspects in the ensuing murder investigation. Talley deals sensitively with such aging issues as consensual sex among residents, vulnerability to scam artists, declining cognitive abilities, autocratic relatives, and the importance of touch and music in providing comfort. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

August 5, 2013
After a slow beginning, Talley’s 12th Hannah Ives mystery (after 2012’s The Last Refuge) delivers steady wit, intrigue, and shocks. Hannah, a feisty grandmother and cancer survivor, joins her two compatible sisters and 14-year-old niece, Julie, on an eight-day cruise from Baltimore to Bermuda aboard the luxurious Islander. Once at sea, Hannah befriends David Warren, a terse and edgy passenger traveling solo, and discovers that his grown daughter, Charlotte, disappeared 18 months earlier from the Islander’s sister ship while working at their teen camp. What’s more, a young girl was viciously attacked on that cruise. Later, Julie is given alcohol-laced drinks, and, more disturbing, is assaulted, beaten, and dumped in a remote area of the ship. Is this somehow connected to Charlotte’s disappearance and the earlier attack? David and Hannah make a determined (if not always rational) team in a basically lighthearted read that builds to a satisfying conclusion. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.