by Linda Fairstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2017
The usual formula—an irresistible hook, a heroine too feisty to be considered truly embattled, a heap of expository...
Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper becomes a person of interest—a great deal of interest—in the death of her boss.
Cooper’s always had a complicated relationship with Manhattan DA Paul Battaglia. Still on leave following her traumatic kidnapping (Devil’s Bridge, 2015), she leaves a fundraiser at the Metropolitan Museum of Art only to have a dark figure rush up the imposing stairs, call out her name, and collapse in her arms with two bullets in him. It doesn’t matter that Cooper, who heads Manhattan’s Special Victims Unit, has long been a fixture in her office. She’s treated just like anyone else found in such a compromising position—a photo a dog walker snaps turns up in next morning’s newspaper headlined “Death Grip”—and maybe even worse. That’s because Jaxon Stern, the detective imported from Brooklyn South to head the investigation because he hasn’t worked with Cooper, has had a grudge against her ever since she prosecuted his brother-in-law for raping a Columbia student. Only that afternoon, Cooper (Killer Look, 2016, etc.) and Detective Mike Chapman, her NYPD lover, had watched in dismay as Battaglia emerged from the town house of international businessmen George Kwan. Although Kwan maintains that Battaglia was nothing more than an acquaintance, Cooper and Chapman are sure there’s more to the connection. They’ll have to follow it to Central Park and the Bronx Zoo and a complex web of “humans, heroin, and wildlife...trafficked globally by a large organization,” allowing Cooper to learn and share a double measure of information about poaching, zoos, well-connected secret societies, and organizations devoted to both preserving and hunting endangered species en route to another of Fairstein’s favored scenic landmark shootouts and an entirely predictable arrest.
The usual formula—an irresistible hook, a heroine too feisty to be considered truly embattled, a heap of expository thriller, and plotting that manages to be both ambitious and flabby—done to its usual turn.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98404-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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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