by Aimée Thurlo & David Thurlo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1995
Racism and religious fanaticism make for strong villains in a promising suspense-series debut by the Thurlos (Second Shadow, 1993, not reviewed). When her father, a Christian minister in the Southwest, is found murdered, Navajo FBI agent Ella Clah returns to the reservation—only to find the community torn between traditionalist and modernist factions, and herself received with suspicion by those who feel she abandoned the tribe for success in the white world. Meanwhile, the FBI investigation is being conducted by a rough-edged Anglo whose troubled history in the community prompts Ella to act as liaison between the bureau, the tribe, and the tribal police, headed by her former father-in-law. Because her father's body was mutilated in a way that suggests a ritual killing, suspicion has fallen on Ella's brother, Clifford, a medicine man whose adherence to Navajo tradition has earned him the respect of many but also brought him into opposition with his father. Before the murder, Clifford, who has now disappeared, argued with his father over the construction of a church on the reservation. Uneasy but resolved to learn the truth, Ella makes contact with her brother through Wilson, his friend—and her admirer. Clifford believes that their father was killed by skinwalkers, a religious cult that practices black magic and claims the church site as their own. Several grisly occurrences follow: The bodies of deformed animals are found at the church site; ghostly coyotes are spotted; and three men are found slaughtered in a manner similar to the minister's killing—all of which escalates fears and tension and forces Ella to reconsider the traditional beliefs she discarded years ago. The murderer is chosen believably, but characters are thinly sketched—especially the heroine, whose external life outweighs her inner one. The real pleasure here is in the complex depiction of cultural conflict and assimilation.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85652-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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More by David Thurlo
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by David Thurlo ; Aimée Thurlo
BOOK REVIEW
by David Thurlo ; Aimée Thurlo
BOOK REVIEW
by Aimée Thurlo ; David Thurlo
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 Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
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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