Morrell (Extreme Denial, 1996, etc.) slams two wildly unrelated stories together to produce this misshapen, empty, though greased-lightning thriller. Story #1. Prizewinning photographer Mitch Coltrane, back home from Bosnia, is being threatened and stalked by somebody who calls himself “the judge”’somebody who’s obviously Dragan Ilkovic, the Serb commander whose heinous war crimes Mitch managed to document, at hair-raising peril, just before he left. Mitch wants to put the ugliness of his life’s work behind him by shooting an updated series of photos of the opulent Hollywood homes immortalized in the work of legendary photographer Randolph Packard back in the 1930s. But Packard dies shortly after bringing Coltrane on board, and Ilkovic—not just a war criminal, but a sadistic torturer and an electronics freak—keeps getting closer, killing Coltrane’s neighbor and friend, an LAPD cop on the case, and Coltrane’s grandparents in Connecticut, in a race toward a showdown—halfway through the novel—that suddenly clears the ground for Story #2. This one is a tender (though equally corpse-strewn) tale of romantic intrigue that starts when Coltrane, who’s purchased an old home Packard photographed and bought for himself, becomes besotted with a trove of photos of Rebecca Chance, a stunning Hollywood hopeful from the ’40s, then (following the trail to another of Packard’s houses) meets Natasha Adler, who looks eerily like the reincarnation of Rebecca Chance. Coltrane’s loyal friend, editor, and sometime lover Jennifer Lane warns him that Tash is trouble, but does the big lug listen? Desperate to forget Ilkovic’s carnage, as well as all those ugly war photos, he keeps missing the chasm that even half-wit readers, who—ve had the benefit of 200 pages to think it over, will see yawning beneath his feet. The first story is midgrade, unsurprising stalker stuff; the second, which ends with Coltrane becoming a stalker himself, is risible. Think Vertigo rewritten for Steven Seagal. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: May 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-51963-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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