Once again, Coburn (Voices in the Dark, 1994, etc.) uses crime as the point of departure for an examination of his troubled characters. This time, though, the crime is the crime of the century, and the canvas is uncommonly broad and rich. It all begins as a typical story of two kids from the Bronx, Rudy Farber and Joseph Shellenbach, competing for the favors of one Gretchen Krause (who says openly that she loves them both) and waiting for the big break that'll lift them out of their dead-end lives. Rolling-stone carpenter Rudy's idea of a big break is the ransom he's sure his latest client, Charles Lindbergh, will pay for the return of his son. But shortly after Rudy hatches his kidnapping plan—which will involve both Shell and Rudy's dim, honorable co-worker Bruno Richard Hauptmann as accomplices—Shell's own baby, David, dies, a casualty of his disturbed wife Helen. Aching to make Helen whole again, Shell carries out his part of the plan but adds a wrinkle by switching the children, leaving David to be found by the authorities who'll hunt down Hauptmann, and raising Charles Lindbergh Jr. as his own. The changeling can't halt Helen's slide toward twilit apathy, but he becomes the mainstay of his proud, agonized father's life. Coburn echoes Doctorow's Ragtime not only in his compounding of fiction, myth, and history, but in the syncopated, insistently metaphorical rhythms of his prose, which winnows years and decades down to mordant images as young David and his friends, echoing the fortunes of their forebears, find their bodies swelling and thrusting under their clothes, phone girlfriends or prostitutes once a week, then mark their advancing years by looking everywhere for handrails. Since nothing ever changes in Coburn's sad, dizzying view of history, it's only a matter of time—under Ronald Reagan, centrist Republican David is running for Massachusetts governor—when Shell confronts his son with the truth about his parentage. A revelation almost unbearably tender and haunting.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81529-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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