Bloodlines
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | Jan Burke |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | An Irene Kelly Novel |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Honors | |
| The year is 1958. O’Connor, a young reporter with the Las Piernas News Express, is desperate to discover who has perpetrated a savage attack on his mentor, Jack Corrigan. In and out of consciousness, Corrigan claims to have witnessed the burial of a bloodstained car on a farm, but his reputation as a heavy drinker calls his strange story into question. In a seemingly unrelated mystery, a yacht bearing four members of the wealthy Ducane family disappears during a storm off the coast. An investigation finds that the Ducane home has been broken into; a… | |
The year is 1958. O’Connor, a young reporter with the Las Piernas News Express, is desperate to discover who has perpetrated a savage attack on his mentor, Jack Corrigan. In and out of consciousness, Corrigan claims to have witnessed the burial of a bloodstained car on a farm, but his reputation as a heavy drinker calls his strange story into question. In a seemingly unrelated mystery, a yacht bearing four members of the wealthy Ducane family disappears during a storm off the coast. An investigation finds that the Ducane home has been broken into; a nursemaid has been killed; and Max, the infant heir, has gone missing. Corrigan recovers his health, but despite a police investigation and his own tireless inquiries, the mysteries of the buried car and the whereabouts of Maxwell Ducane haunt him until his death.
Twenty years after that fateful night, in her first days as a novice reporter working for managing editor O’Connor, Irene Kelly covers the groundbreaking ceremony for a shopping center—which unexpectedly yields the unearthing of a buried car. In the trunk are human remains. Are those of the infant heir among them? If so, who is the young man who has recently changed his name to Max Ducane? Again the trail goes maddeningly, perhaps suspiciously, cold.
Until today. Irene, now married to homicide detective Frank Harriman, is a veteran reporter facing the impending closing of the Las Piernas News Express. With circulation down and young reporters fresh out of journalism school replacing longtime staffers, Irene can’t help but wish for the good old days when she worked with O’Connor. So when the baffling kidnap-burial case resurfaces, Irene’s tenacious love for her mentor and journalistic integrity far outweigh any fears or trepidation. Determined to make a final splash for her beloved paper and solve the mystery that plagued O’Connor until his death, Irene pursues a story that reunites her with her past and may end her career—and her life.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Best-selling author Jan Burke’s heroine, reporter Irene Kelly (Bones) returns in a novel that in less capable hands might seem like just another ho-hum story about the kidnapping of an infant who might or might not have been the child of a wealthy couple found dead under somewhat clouded circumstances. But it’s really an intricate and involving story about hero worship—the affection of a cub reporter for his mentor, and the efforts of a young woman journalist who does them both proud by getting to the bottom of a two-decades old mystery; a bloodstained car buried on a farm and unearthed twenty years later, a dead nursemaid, and the missing heir to a fortune left by a couple who disappeared at sea the same weekend reporter Jack Corrigan was beaten and left for dead. Neither Corrigan nor young Conn O’Connor, his protégé, has ever unraveled the connection between those events, but with the discovery of the buried car that Corrigan believed to his dying day he witnessed disappearing under tons of dirt the night he was attacked, Irene finds herself following an old trail that may lead her right into harm’s way herself. Bloodlines is one of Burke’s best, a well-paced, deftly plotted mystery that will delight her many fans. —Jane Adams
