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GODS AND LESSER MEN

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A young lawyer confronts eugenics in his family and his own questionable heritage—not to mention murder and thievery—in this legal thriller that shakes a family tree to its roots.

Thinking his life has been turned upside down when his patrician New England girlfriend, Alexis, announces her pregnancy and imminent abortion, Harry Monmouth soon finds that that’s the least of his problems. Scion of a prominent family, Harry discovers the family fortune is based on his judge father’s theft from psychiatric patients questionably committed; his mother and her eminent doctor father were also involved in eugenics stretching back to some infamous European fascists in the 1930s. Their work continues with an abortion clinic and the State Breeding and Betterment Board, which requires that unfit citizens be sterilized. When proceedings start against the indigent and fertile sister of an old African-American friend, Harry defends her right to choose; his discoveries help him recognize “the odious dysfunctional bloodline that was my family.” While the expository dialogue can sound a bit stilted and is never as powerful as the action, the book rarely lingers to pontificate. There are some awkward moments, as when another African-American friend of Harry’s, an empowered and intelligent woman, describes her schoolgirl crush on him: “a kitchen wench mooning over a young master.” Thompson otherwise has excellent control of his characters, and their motivations are expertly and appropriately wed to a seamless plot where nothing is out of place. In particular, the theme of eugenics is incorporated well into the plot on many levels. Harry matures from wealthy, irresponsible postgrad to a man owning his past, determined to prove he’s the apple that fell far from the tree.

Social issues don’t impede this slightly gothic crime story topped with well-laid logical revelations.

Pub Date: March 17, 2014

ISBN: 978-0615977676

Page Count: 300

Publisher: W & B Publishers Inc.

Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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DRAGON TEETH

Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...

In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.

William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.

Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.

Pub Date: May 23, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017

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