A sterling thriller whose flawed protagonist consistently evokes sympathy despite the repugnance of some of his acts.
A broken life barely healed is put to a stern test.
John Bekker was a promising police detective when his wife was raped and murdered in front of their young daughter, Regan. Badly traumatized, Regan spent years in a special home; Bekker found his solace in the bottom of a bottle. Now Bekker is about to marry his sister-in-law, Janet, a nurse with whom a vastly improved teenage Regan is living. Solving his wife’s murder (Sunset, 2012) put Bekker on the road to recovery. Though Janet hates the dangers of his life as a private eye, she asks him to take on a case for Dr. Robert Gordon, a hospital administrator who was still in medical school when his wife died in childbirth and his uncle, a sleazy attorney, helped him sell his newborn daughter to a childless New York couple. Now that Gordon’s dying of cancer, he wants the girl found so he can leave her part of his fortune. Bekker has little trouble finding the Gertz family, who raised Sarah with love. But after graduating from college, the bright young woman vanished from her job in Washington, D.C. With the help of his former partner and an old friend in the FBI, Bekker comes up with the idea that Oliver Koch, a powerful senator from Maine, had Sarah killed. Under pressure, Koch’s devoted assistant, Chad Handler, admits that Sarah was pregnant with Koch’s child and refused to have an abortion but denies that Koch had her murdered. When a professional assassin attacks Bekker and severely beats Janet, he kills the assailant. Despite the dangers of bucking a powerful man and the moral ambiguities involved in protecting his family, Bekker refuses to back down.
Pub Date: July 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2865-3
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Five Star
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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