Skeletons

Rating:
Summary: Eidetic memory aids heroine
Review: An underachiever in a family of academic stars (although possessing an eidetic visual memory), Lee Donne is at loose ends when she fails to graduate college, and accepts an invitation to housesit for her grandfather while he's in London. The security system on his old house is surprisingly sophisticated for a Shakespearean scholar with no interest in material goods, and then there's the noises at night - someone throwing gravel at the roof, it sounds like, though the police find no gravel or evidence of any disturbance at all. Sleepless and terrified, Lee gets her college roommate to come and together they set a trap for the mysterious prowler - a trap that backfires, ending in a man's death.

Instead of calling the police, Lee and Casey get rid of the body. This is a bit hard to swallow and, in my opinion, not key to the plot, but naturally leads to some harrowing difficulties. Not nearly so harrowing, however, as what happens after Lee makes a shocking find while searching the house and decides to take action, putting her life and others at risk. The last half of the book is a chase and discovery as Lee puts her phenomenal memory to work exposing the dark underbelly of southern racism and atrocity, staying barely a skip ahead of the villains.

Wilhelm's ("Desperate Measures," "The Good Children") flair for nuanced psychological suspense is in top form. Lee is a woman to root for as she finds purpose in life and puts the plot in high gear with her fine intellect and amazing memory. Though fast-paced, the story makes room for the character development Wilhelm readers look for. That first body niggles at the reader though, a loose end never satisfactorily resolved.

Rating:
Summary: First Time
Review: First time I have read this author - read the book in one sitting and was truly surprised and delighted. The plot was excellent, the heroine intelligent, and the book continued where most writers simply run out of steam or to formula. I'll be reading more of Ms. Wilhelm for the sheer luxurious pleasure of all the criteria above. Thanks!

Rating:
Summary: First Time
Review: First time I have read this author - read the book in one sitting and was truly surprised and delighted. The plot was excellent, the heroine intelligent, and the book continued where most writers simply run out of steam or to formula. I'll be reading more of Ms. Wilhelm for the sheer luxurious pleasure of all the criteria above. Thanks!

Rating:
Summary: Delightful Diversion! Hard to Put Down!
Review: Kate Wilhelm has become one of my favorite writers of romantic suspense. Ever spent a summer afternoon delighted to be travelling the world in the pages of a Phyllis Whitney or M.M. Kaye novel? If so, you'll love this book!

"Skeletons" is a delightful page turner. The mystery is well-plotted and suspenseful. Unraveling the strands of a decades-old secret takes our heroine, Lee, on an ever-more exciting journey across the country. It is also a voyage of self-discovery. Lee starts off as a not-quite college graduate, a few hours short after four years of shifting from major to major. In a family of overachievers, she is the disappointment. In the course of "Skeletons," she discovers herself as not just competent, but gifted.

Rating:
Summary: A Guilty Pleasure!
Review: Lee Donne is an underachiever, mired in a family of overachievers-a mother with three doctorates, an economics genius for a father, a grandfather who is a world-renowned Shakespearean scholar, and a brother who has just graduated from medical school and is embarking on an internship. Even her roommate is a computer genius. But Lee can't even settle on a major. She changes it every time she gets within a whisker's length of graduating. She does have one ability going for her, though-a photographic memory.

With nothing better to do, she agrees to house sit for her grandfather. She's braced herself for a boring time of cataloguing books and quiet evenings, but that scenario soon proves to be false. She starts hearing strange noises at night, and sees a shadowy figure lurking on the grounds. She's convinced that someone is trying to scare her to the point of leaving the house unguarded. She can't even guess at what he might want from inside the house. Soon, however, she discovers that it's skeletons in her own family's closet that holds the key to the mystery. To make matters worse, the dark secrets she discovers go well beyond her own family and into the political arena. Armed with only her photographic memory and with the aid of her roommate and a newspaper reporter hell-bent on breaking a top story, she is suddenly on a rollercoaster ride of an investigation that takes her from the northwest to New Orleans. However, her investigation could not only have grave repercussions for her family, but also put her life and the lives of her two friends at great risk.

Romantic mysteries are not usually my genre of choice. There is no substance or nutritional value. However, every now and then, like breaking a strict diet, I need to feed on a guilty pleasure, such as candy or a hot fudge sundae. This book is like that. It fills a need, like junk food for the mind. It limped along at the beginning, but soon picked up a full head of steam and kept me engrossed and turning pages. I fell in love with Lee Donne for all her foibles and character flaws. The mystery was no great mystery, but it was fun to see how she unraveled it in her own mind, like watching Columbo-even though you know who done it, it's fun to see him wade through the mystery. The book limps again a little bit at the very end, but all in all it succeeded in fulfilling my craving for a much-needed guilty pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: Keeps you Guessing!
Review: Lee Donne is housesitting for her grandfather when strange things start to happen. Things are going bump in the night. The house holds a secret--a secret someone dies for, a secret the FBI is searching for, a secret that just might kill Lee as well. Kate Wilhelm's Skeltons, takes original twists and turns that left me guessing. A wonderfully engrossing read!

Rating:
Summary: Gets off to a good start but fizzles
Review: Lee is the ordinary duckling in a family of brilliant genius swans and sometimes it hurts. After failing to graduate her exasperated mother packs her off to house sit for grandfather while he goes off on a lecture tour. Immediately, things get strange. Someone is terrorizing Lee and she suspects it's due to he skeletons in her family tree.

So far so good. I liked Lee and I loved how the story moves along up to this point but two things come close to ruining the book for me. First: Are the nation's creative writing teachers all telling their students that black characters must be written the same way? Lee's black roommate from college is sassy, jokey, and calls her "baby" every five minutes. She also suffers a complete melt down at the sight of a 50 year old klan robe. The author meant well, with this character but I suspect she doesn't know any real live black people and based this character on stuff she's seen in the movies. Next, the description of New Orleans was dumb. As another reviewer said, things have changed. The Big Easy depends on tourism and the scene with the TV never would've happened in real life. The town has had two black mayors, and the police force is mostly black. The author needed to do her research.
Bottom line: Would I buy another one of this author's books? Yes, but only after I spend some time leafing through it first and after checking out the Amazon reviews.

Rating:
Summary: Quedice's Review of "Skeletons" by Kate Wilhem
Review: Quedice ripped Wilhelm for "a narrow view of New Orleans".

For some reason I have thought that what Wilhelm was writing was
"fiction". For some reason Quedice thinks that his/her fact should be in Wilhelm's fiction. My feeling is if you want fact,
you should read "non fiction" and then most of the time you still get a lot of fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Quedice's Review of "Skeletons" by Kate Wilhem
Review: Quedice ripped Wilhelm for "a narrow view of New Orleans".

For some reason I have thought that what Wilhelm was writing was
"fiction". For some reason Quedice thinks that his/her fact should be in Wilhelm's fiction. My feeling is if you want fact,
you should read "non fiction" and then most of the time you still get a lot of fiction.

Rating:
Summary: electrifying psychological suspense
Review: She is the ugly duckling in a family of swans. Her mother has three doctorates; her father is a Ph.D. who advises world leaders; while her brother is an internist. Lee Donne has changed her major three times and in four years she doesn't have enough credits to graduate. She takes her grandfather up on his offer to house sit for five months while she regroups but when she settles in, a strange man tosses gravel at her house at night.

Lee and Casey set a trap to catch the man but it backfires and he dies. Lee decides to find out what she is looking for but when she discovers a hidden door in the floor of the photo lab. There she discovers her family's darkest secret, their ties to the Klan. She also finds existence that a third party candidate running for the president once participated in a Klan lynching. Lee has the journalistic story of a life time but she has to live through various attempts or her life to see it in print.

Kate Wilhelm is the mistress of psychological suspense and she proves it with SKELETONS, an electrifying tale filled with so many serpentine twists, readers are always taken by surprise by the plot developments. The maturation of the heroine from innocent protected schoolgirl to fugitive from a well hidden cell of fanatics rings true and shows the depth of the author's skills.

Harriet Klausner