Book Review: Juror Number Ten by Caroline Taylor

Genre: Thriller/romantic suspense

Bio: 

Caroline Taylor is a novelist and short-story writer who grew up in the mountain west and traveled widely, including a brief stint in the Foreign Service. A former editor of Humanities magazine, she is the author of several mysteries, one short-story collection, and a nonfiction book. Two of her novels won the Firebird Book award, and a third was a finalist for the Freddie Award. A member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, she lives in North Carolina.

 

Blurb: 

Forgive their trespasses? One has committed murder. Two have committed adultery, and the third has stooped to petty spying. When Sophie Dickson becomes the reluctant tenth juror in a DC murder trial, she encounters the man whose marriage she destroyed through a drunken act of adultery. The prosecutor knows he will lose the case, which is what his boss wants. The plaintiff, Nona Pierce, refuses to plead guilty, even while owning up to the murder. She just wants her day in court. Instead, she’s kidnapped, the prosecutor is fired, and Juror Number Ten finds herself in the middle of a situation far less appealing than jury duty—and much more dangerous. How could a murder prompted by a lawsuit over real estate grow into a war between an alleged crime boss and a gang of scary Russians willing to murder to get what they want?

 

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Excerpt

Cody made his report as brief as he could. When he finished, Gordon said, “I’m not hopeful they’ll find her. There must be three hundred black SUVs in the DC area—and that’s if the kidnappers aren’t halfway to Baltimore by now. I suppose the police have put out a BOLO to the airports and train stations.”

“Bolo?” Sophie had been quietly sitting there, legs crossed, one nicely shaped foot bouncing nervously back and forth. Clearly she didn’t understand the term. Gordon smiled at her.

“It’s shorthand for ‘be on the lookout.’ Of course, the FBI will get involved since it’s a kidnapping. Which will help.” The look he bestowed on Sophie reminded Cody of the way Professor Abercrombie dealt with his students at Georgetown.

“Would you care to add to Cody’s account, Ms. Dickson?” “I’m afraid not. If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll be on my way.”

“Yes, of course. But first, I want to show you some photos.”

“I never saw his face.”

“Bear with me. Are you hungry? I could have sandwiches brought in.” He stood and went to a filing cabinet where he started rummaging through one of the drawers. This was a rarity for a man who hated to be caught standing anywhere near anybody as tall as Cody happened to be.

Cody plopped down on the sofa beside her. “I’m partial to the tuna melt, but they also have burgers.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Or salads,” said Gordon, “or ice cream.” He held a thick manila folder.

Sophie sighed. “Oh, all right. I suppose I should eat.”

“Atta girl.” Gordon patted her shoulder. Cody got to his feet. “I’ll order lunch. You want the usual, Gordon?”

“Sure, and you, Ms. Dickson?” “I guess the tuna melt.” Gordon’s assistant Martha would get the food, but Cody figured it would be best to leave the two of them to deal with the photos. After he’d talked to Martha, he checked for any messages on his phone. A request to reschedule tomorrow’s meeting with Terence O’Brien, the real estate agent whose carelessness or ignorance with respect to DC real estate law had royally screwed Nona Pierce out of her money. Fine. Let him stew. Nona hadn’t known Cody had been pursuing the now-moot civil case at Gordon’s behest. If there was an acquittal in the murder trial, Gordon had planned to sue the realtor for negligence. Apparently, the boss had a huge soft spot in his heart for his missing client.

The only other message was a text from Max Crowell wanting to know when they could hit the courts at Hains Point. So did Cody. He’d done so much walking and stair climbing and getting in and out of cars today that he wondered if he’d ever be able to move without pain again. His ankle was aching like a jilted woman’s heart. “Don’t know,” he texted back.

When he got back to Gordon’s office, Sophie was laughing. “That’s so not PC. But it really is funny.” Gordon was laughing too.

“Yeah. I have a lot of jokes in my repertoire, but I only tell them to my friends.” Jesus. Why not spread it on real thick?

“Any luck?”

“Yep,” said Gordon.

“Ms. Dickson—” “Sophie. Please.”

“Sophie here thinks the snatcher had a physique similar to this guy.”

He handed a photo to Cody, pointing to the man at the left. It was one of the photos Cody had taken at the church social where the late (courtesy of Nona Pierce) Tatiana Orlovsky and her son Grigor joined others every Sunday evening for a potluck supper of Russian comfort food, lubricated liberally with vodka. The three men appeared to be singing, their arms draped across one another’s shoulders. The bearded guy in the middle was tall and thin, a Russian Ichabod Crane. The short guy on the right had close-set eyes and a jowly face hinting of indulgence in a few too many blinis over the years. The guy on the left was huge with a weight lifter’s enormous arms and no neck. Still, it was a stretch.

“Why would guys from Orlovsky’s church go after Pierce?”

“Jesus, Cody. Think about it. We always thought Ms. Orlovsky had to be one of those embedded spies we keep hearing about, especially because of her line of business. Well, all these people are Russian émigrés, a.k.a. spies. One of their own was murdered. They want an eye for an eye.” “After three whole years?”

“It could have taken a while for them to gin up the courage—or to collect their orders from Moscow.”

“Oh, come on,” said Sophie.

“You’re talking as though this is still the Cold War.” Gordon gave her the fish eye.

“Meet the new war; same as the old war.”

 

Review

This is the second book I have read of the author Caroline Taylor.

Nona and Sophie stood on the opposite sides of the law. The one was a jury member, the other the accused.

But when Nona got kidnapped, the entire game changed. Instead of being in court, we tag along as people scramble to find Nona and keep her safe. I really liked this elderly woman and can relate to her story as she try to stay alive and get some money to live from. Being close to 60 myself, I understand the turmoil of looking for ways to increase your income. It is simply a never-ending story with its own predicaments which can lead you to trouble, quickly.

The characters that the author added, really set the tone of the rest of the story and soon I was lost in the trappings and nuances of the plot.

The characters are well developed and relatable. The flow is easy to follow, and the momentum is to the point. Pointing out the different races, became a bity weary but otherwise a great story right to the end.

 

Well dressed Lies by Carrie Hayes

 

Well Dressed Lies

by Carrie Hayes

Black Coffee Book Tours

January 23-26

London, 1877.
Retired suffragists, VICTORIA WOODHULL and TENNESEE CLAFLIN
are shrewd, attractive, and looking for husbands. But their backgrounds are sketchy. No one knows they've been paid - some might say bribed - a fortune to leave New York. That they've been accused of intrigue, blackmail and worse are details best left alone. But when Victoria finds the love of her life, her prospects are threatened by a striking resemblance to a character in a story by Henry James.
Frantic to whitewash their past, she seeks Tennessee's help, unaware that Tennessee is in the midst of her own struggle, consumed by an illicit affair with a Duchess who is not only married, but is also mistress to the Prince of Wales.

Universal link for the book on Amazon

About the Author

Carrie Hayes was born in New York City. She grew up around journalists, idealists and rule breaking women. Find her on Medium.com, Substack.com and on her upcoming podcast, Angry Dead Women.

Carrie's debut novel, Naked Truth or Equality was an Editor's Choice in the Historical Novel Review.

The Midwest Review describes her latest book, Well Dressed Lies, as "an inviting novel of intrigue, mischief, and love that invites libraries and readers to partake of a story replete in changing alliances, closely-held secrets, and social change that romps through high society relationships on both sides of the pond."

https://linktr.ee/carriehayeswrites

https://carriehayeswrites.com/

https://www.instagram.com/carriehayes1964/

Review 

Unraveling knots and constructing ideas about this book was a genuine puzzle. It took me about two chapters just to get into the idea of the book. Which is too long when you try to capture a reader’s attention. 

“The conjugation of regular and irregular verbs in a Romance language goes a long way toward unraveling knots of anxiety in one’s mind. Remarkable, really, how one’s hesitations vanish when consumed with the construction necessary in composing ideas so that language functions not merely to communicate, but to perform. With style, as it were.” 

The three different perspectives added to the reading challenge. I think if the author had written each chapter from a different point of view, it would have been an easier read. But, since it is a rapped change within one chapter, I could not enjoy the story as I would have liked. 

I always love a good historical read with a woman finding her own voice in the mixture of plot and story. However, in Well dressed lies the plot was almost winded, and I was not sure what the purpose of the story was in the beginning. 

The synopsis suggested about these two women, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, have left New York under mysterious circumstances and settled in London. But this was vague, almost hidden within the voyage to Londen as people communicated with them or avoided them all together. Though they are charming, clever, and wealthy, the secrets and scandals were not clear either. 

“As a family, we rarely discussed the fallout, what would happen, how it would look, what people would choose to believe. By the time we moved to London, it almost didn’t matter. There were few people who were privy to the truth of our actual, everyday lives. Those who didn’t know us assumed we were two foolish women, who blushed at nothing, prepared to knock over anything that stood in our path. But that was false. We were not that way at all.” 

When Victoria falls in love with a man who resembles a character from a Henry James story, she fears that her identity will be exposed. She asks Tennessee for help, but Tennessee is too busy with her own troubles. She is having a forbidden affair with a married Duchess who is also involved with the Prince of Wales. 

Tennie, or Tennessee, was the more approachable, more relatable of the three. But still hard to understand. She was floating around, unsure most of the time, with no definite purpose. Waiting on a man is not a purpose. 

The third person in this book is Henry James, a man whose role within the story was unclear for quite a few chapters. He was shrouded in secrets himself and I found him an out-of-place sort of bloke. “WORDS: loquacious, garrulous, voluble, periphrastic, insidious, surreptitious IDEAS: a man bereft of ideas sets out to find the love letters of a long dead poet. She to whom the letters were written agrees to grant him access, upon one condition.” 

 This is how every section of his point of view began. A strange way of introducing an author, or was it an apt way of keeping the reader’s interest? I simply could not tell. 

Overall, not a book that I would recommend. Thanks for the opportunity to read it though.