For the most part, Jane’s many fans, who’ve missed her ever since Blood Money (2000), will be glad to see her at any price.
After nine years of being AWOL, Jane Whitefield McKinnon, the world’s foremost specialist in hiding fugitives from their pursuers, is back with a vengeance.
Christine Monahan, 20 and pregnant, staggers into Buffalo General Hospital asking if anyone can direct her to Jane Whitefield. Her search would be easier if she knew that Dr. Carey McKinnon’s wife, the committee chair who’s just capped a successful fundraising effort, was the woman she was looking for. As it is, Christine doesn’t meet Jane until after the hospital has been bombed in an attempt to flush her out into the open. It’s only the first of many strategies employed by the six hired guns sociopathic San Diego developer Richard Beale has sent after the ex-employee who was also his ex-lover. Keeping six people on salary 24/7 runs into serious money, but Richard has compelling motives for hunting down Christine. It isn’t enough that she broke off the affair because he’d been so abusive, or that she’s learned some unsavory secrets about the family business Richard runs for his impossibly demanding parents, who consider him “a bully, a sneak, a loafer, a coward.” In addition, the baby she’s carrying has become his sole hope of keeping any claim to the family fortune. So Richard needs Christine and her unborn child back quickly and alive. Putting five years of domestic peace behind her, Jane snaps smartly to attention—“I have to leave tonight,” she tells her long-suffering husband—keeping Christine half a step ahead of her pursuers until she can get her settled in Minneapolis under a new identity. But since Jane’s clients never enjoy true peace, only breath-catching intervals before the next round of action, it’s never in doubt that sooner or later Richard’s crew will come calling in the Twin Cities, kicking off the last, and most generic, phase of this high-potency thriller.
For the most part, Jane’s many fans, who’ve missed her ever since Blood Money (2000), will be glad to see her at any price.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101528-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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