It’s pure pleasure watching all these meddling well-wishers fall into their appointed places in McBain’s well-oiled plot....
McBain takes a week away from the 87th Precinct (Hark!, p. 607) for a kidnapping in Florida without Matthew Hope or any of his regulars.
Alice Glendenning is just trying to hang on till the life-insurance check comes. In the eight months since her stockbroker husband Eddie drowned in the Gulf, the onetime film student has turned herself into a realtor, though she has yet to close a single sale, and is waiting patiently for her eight-year-old son, who hasn’t said a word since Eddie’s death, to start talking again. Now she’s afraid she may have missed her chance for good. Jamie and Ashley, his ten-year-old sister, have been abducted by a black woman and a blond accomplice. And Alice’s bank account is $247,000 short of the quarter-mil ransom demand. Although she doesn’t breathe a word to the law, her housekeeper isn’t nearly so circumspect, and before long the Port October Police and the FBI are camping inside her house. So are Rafe Matthews, her shiftless brother-in-law; Jennifer Redding, the twit whose car broke Alice’s ankle; and Charlie Hobbs, her only real friend. In fact, Alice, who’s felt utterly alone since Eddie’s death, finds that she has just enough friends and neighbors to drive her crazy.
It’s pure pleasure watching all these meddling well-wishers fall into their appointed places in McBain’s well-oiled plot. The procedural king makes the whole caper look so easy you wonder why all suspense novels aren’t this slick.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6250-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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