by Anne Perry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2016
The parchment that’s been so contested, along with two others equally sought, turns out to be something priceless,...
Perry’s 14th helping of seasonal warmth and crime (Revenge in a Cold River, 2016, etc.) is more stripped-down and elemental than ever, maybe because its Holy Land setting casts such a spell.
Now that he’s retired from Special Branch, Lord Victor Narraway can do what he likes, and what he likes at Christmas 1900 is to bring Lady Vespasia, his wife of nearly two years, on a trip to Jerusalem. Even before they reach the Holy City, their journey seems suffused by a portentous note struck by an elderly man with whom they happen to dine in Jaffa. Although he never tells them his name, they are struck by his gravity and humility in discussing his travels and his attachment to Jerusalem and horrified when his throat is cut the following night—not just because his hotel room is quite close to theirs, not even because he had been quick to second Vespasia’s uncanny suspicion that someone had been watching their meeting. When Victor finds in his pocket a note their companion has left them warning that “the Watcher draws near” and asking them to deliver the accompanying parchment, written in a language they cannot read, to the House of Bread on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa by Christmas Eve, they set out with new purpose and a new sense of danger. The Watcher, of course, is on their trail, and they’ll need all the help they can get from Benedict, a fellow passenger who escapes with them from the train to Jerusalem, and Haroun, whose followers rescue them from the desert to which they’ve surrendered themselves.
The parchment that’s been so contested, along with two others equally sought, turns out to be something priceless, inspiring, and not at all likely to disturb any readers of this extended greeting card who keep Christmas.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88638-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
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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by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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