Fans savvy enough to ignore the ill-advised extras and keep their eyes on the duel between Rhyme and Unsub 40 will be...
The latest of Lincoln Rhyme’s fiendishly inventive antagonists is a killer who rails against rampant consumerism online, then hacks into the Internet of Things to murder New Yorkers who’ve grown too attached to their computer-driven toys.
Following a spotting of the perp dubbed Unsub 40 in a crowded shopping center, the NYPD’s Amelia Sachs is at the point of apprehending him when a calamitous escalator accident claims her attention and bystander Greg Frommer’s life. Unsub 40 escapes to plot further sabotage of the microchips that regulate the behavior of common household and industrial devices that might otherwise turn nightmarishly lethal—though he’d be even happier with the kind of hands-on violence that allowed him to swing a ball-peen hammer or wield a razor-sharp saw. Amelia directs Frommer’s destitute widow, Sandy, to attorney Evers Whitmore and quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme (The Skin Collector, 2014, etc.), who’s now left criminal investigation to teach forensics and concentrate on civil cases, for their help in preparing a liability lawsuit against—well, against anyone they can find with plausible liability and substantial assets. For a while, it looks as if Amelia and Rhyme, her sometime lover, will be competing for expert help and resources. But their two cases predictably join together, freeing them to focus together on what they do best: turning over every clod of dirt in the Big Apple in search of Unsub 40, who continues, through a combination of cunning and uncanny good luck, to elude them. Deaver, evidently worried that he hasn’t provided a generous enough banquet of felonies, interleaves a couple of complementary cases for Rhyme and Amelia’s associates, but these are both subpar and distracting, though they do allow another of his patented multistage, 60-page denouements, though this time with gradually diminishing returns.
Fans savvy enough to ignore the ill-advised extras and keep their eyes on the duel between Rhyme and Unsub 40 will be treated to all the usual thrills, which are worth every breathless minute.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3634-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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