A low-stakes, low-octane thriller that seems to have been cobbled together entirely from dead ends.
Between rounds of international intrigue and blood feuds (Scandalous Behavior, 2016, etc.), even superheroes need a little down time, and Woods provides some for New York cop–turned-attorney-turned–world’s policeman Stone Barrington in his latest outing.
Shoe heiress Carrie Jarman Fiske comes to Stone because she’s convinced that her ex-husband, money manager Harvey Biggers, wants to kill her. And Harvey certainly acts the part to the hilt, turning up in public places to gawk at her, following her across the country to Santa Fe, trying to let himself in to her Palm Beach home. But the corpse Stone discovers in a bedroom next door to Carrie’s East Hampton place is that of a stranger, prostitute Darla Henry, who’d been Harvey’s companion at a New Year’s Eve shindig. What does her death mean? Nothing. Stone persuades Carrie to change the will that left her considerable estate to Harvey, but she gets strangled anyway deep in Georgia O’Keeffe country. Did Harvey, who’d been spotted nearby hours before, kill her? No. Even before the hostile ex, who’d claimed that Carrie was trying to kill him, proves a disconcertingly ironclad alibi, Stone has moved on to yet another complication: Carrie’s possession of a choker that looks just like the one Gustav Klimt’s model wore in the painting the movies have forever dubbed The Lady in Gold. Is it the real thing or a clever copy? And either way, will some forgettable jewel thief make off with it before Jamie Niven, Stone’s friend at Sotheby’s, places it on the auction block? If these questions make your heart beat faster, this is the tale for you. President Kate Lee also invites Stone to review the candidacies of three attorneys, one of them his insatiable ex-fling Tiffany Baldwin, for the Supreme Court. Maybe his recommendation will have consequences in some later installment of this bestselling series.
A low-stakes, low-octane thriller that seems to have been cobbled together entirely from dead ends.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17469-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
