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DESOLATION FLATS

Once the murder is connected to the Nazis, everyone becomes a potential suspect—except, of course, Hunt’s improbably...

A Mormon police officer’s beliefs about good and evil are tested when the murder of a race car driver appears related to the rising Nazi party.

While Arthur "Art" Oveson (A Killing In Zion, 2015, etc.) is keeping time for his cousin Hank’s speed trials at Salt Lake City’s Bonneville Speedway in 1938, his Mormon beliefs won’t let him fudge the numbers, even a little, to make it seem like Hank’s on top. Anyway, Hank’s times may not matter now that the British have landed in the figure of Clive Underhill, with support from his brother, Nigel. Clive’s come to Utah to break records, and he seems on track to do just that until an explosion in his car during a practice run threatens his life. Art’s sprint to the car to rescue Clive earns him a dinner invitation along with the driver’s everlasting gratitude. It’s a shame the sentiment isn’t shared by Nigel, a sourpuss determined to argue with everyone, even Art’s former police partner Roscoe Lund, who serves as Clive’s paid protection now that he’s left the force. After a late night, Roscoe and Nigel argue loudly and publicly, throwing suspicion on Roscoe when Nigel is found dead the next day. Art is named to head the investigation because he’s in charge of missing persons, and Clive has now disappeared. With Roscoe also gone AWOL and no other known suspects, Art can’t figure out which connections to investigate until he starts to learn about the racing team’s relationship to fascism and Nazism. As deep as he is in his investigation, Art can’t ignore the trouble at home between Clara, his depressed wife, and their eldest daughter, Sarah Jane, who threatens to leave the LDS community and start her own revolution.

Once the murder is connected to the Nazis, everyone becomes a potential suspect—except, of course, Hunt’s improbably virtuous hero, whom readers are likely to either love or loathe.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-250-06461-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

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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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RUNNING BLIND

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 4

Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long...

Soldier-turned-soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher goes after a serial killer in a conventionally but nonetheless deeply satisfying whodunit.

In today's armed services, you lose even when you win—at least if you're a woman who files a sexual harassment complaint. Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke were both successful in their suits, which ended the careers of their alleged harassers. But Callan and Cooke ended up leaving the service themselves, and now they're both dead, murdered by a diabolical perp who keeps leaving behind the same crime scene—the victim's body submerged in a bathtub filled with camouflage paint—and not a single clue to the killer's identity or the cause of death. The FBI hauls in Reacher, who handled both women's complaints as an Army MP, as a prime suspect, then offers to upgrade him to a consulting investigator when their own surveillance gives him an alibi for a third killing. No thanks, says our hero, who's taken an instant dislike to FBI profiler Julia Lamarr, until the Feds' threats against his lawyer girlfriend Jodie Jacob (Tripwire, 1999) bring him into the fold. While Reacher is pretending to study lists of potential victims and suspects and fending off the government-sponsored advances of Quantico's comely Lisa Harper, the murderer is getting ready to pounce on a fourth victim: Lamarr's stepsister Alison. This latest coup does nothing to improve relations between Reacher and the Feebees, all of them determined to prove they're the toughest hombres in the parking lot, but it does set the stage for some honest sleuthing, some treacherous red herrings, and some convincing evidence for Reacher's assertion that all that profiling stuff is just plain common sense.

Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-399-14623-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000

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