Time and Trouble: An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery

Veteran Roberts (the Amanda Pepper series) introduces a new sleuthing pair, Northern California's Emma Howe, middle-aged owner of a middling investigative firm, and Billie August, a young single mother whom Emma hires and whose experience consists solely of having located her toddler son after his father kidnapped him. On her first surveillance, Billie videotapes Sophia Redmond (who claims a fall on the sidewalk has left her disabled), running down steps, but she bungles the taping and is left with no proof. Emma and Billie are astonished when Sophia, back in her wheelchair, shows up with her husband to hire them to locate their missing teenage daughter, Penny. Readers know that Penny has attached herself to a group of medievalists and has found a heart-shaped pendant and the bones of a baby in a field where they are practicing for a fair. The police then find a woman's skeleton nearby. Braiding the points of view of Emma, Billie and Penny, Roberts connects her subplots via the missing girl, the elusive mistress and the pendant. The stakes get serious when Penny decides to help her mother get free from her husband's abusive domination by photographing the woman with whom she believes her father is having an affair. Despite unlikely coincidences, Roberts peels away layers from each character's life, leaving the reader with a suspenseful, affecting tale.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Glance at Emma Howe, and what you see is a no-nonsense 50-year-old built to mow down walls. Widen the perspective to include her brand-new associate, Billie August, and you might decide you're viewing Emma's exact opposite. But you'd be wrong. In the ways that count, you're looking at a matched pair. True, Billie hasn't hit 30 yet. Nor is there anything tanklike about her. She's slender, blond, beautiful, with an elegance that suggests to Emma (audible snarl here) that ``she wore white gloves in her soul.'' The fact is, though, that there's as much steel and drive in Billie as in Emma, and, truly making them sisters under the skin, as much rampaging curiosity. Emma hires Billie out of necessity. Her p.i. is short-handed, and now there's a case involving a missing 18-year-old girl that desperately needs attention. Eventually, the investigation will uncover a murder, connect to an earlier one, and, almost incidentally, to a child porno ring. But the fun here is all in the ripening of an unlikely relationship. As triumphs mount, Billie stops being afraid of her formidable boss, and Emma begins to understand how lucky she is. A departure for Roberts, who forsakes her frothy (Philadelphia-based) Amanda Pepper series (The Mummers' Curse, 1996, etc.) for the opposite coastand something darker and richer. The Howe-August series could be one to watch. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.