by Anne Perry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2001
The Victorian abuses that come in for criticism this time are gambling, anti-Semitism, and the ban on property rights for...
Perry’s latest sojourn among the other Victorians begins with a double mystery for private inquiry agent William Monk’s nurse wife. Hester Monk’s brother Charles Latterly wants his sister to get to the bottom of his wife Imogen’s erratic behavior. Before Hester can properly begin, however, whatever has been troubling Imogen is swiftly overshadowed by graver troubles: Elissa Beck, the beautiful wife of Dr. Kristian Beck, Hester’s colleague at Hampstead Hospital, is murdered at the lodgings of Argo Allardyce, the artist who had been hired by Elissa’s father, politically ambitious attorney Fuller Pendreigh, to paint her portrait. What makes the crime even more heinous is that Allardyce’s model Sarah Mackeson was discovered on the scene with her neck broken as well—because the double fatality rules out any possible defense of accident or involuntary manslaughter. For Kristian’s sake, Hester prays that Elissa became a victim only because she interrupted a murder in progress, but the physical evidence soon shows that Elissa was killed first, and soon thereafter Monk’s loathed former superior, Supt. Runcorn, arrests Kristian. Perry (Funeral in Blue, p. 1171, etc.) passes over most of Kristian’s trial in summary—focusing instead on Monk’s fact-finding trip to Vienna, which provides background material about Elissa’s life with Kristian and an excuse for some canned history of the 1848 uprising—before returning to London for her feeble final thunderclap.
The Victorian abuses that come in for criticism this time are gambling, anti-Semitism, and the ban on property rights for married women. As usual, however, the principals’ many ringing speeches show them equally exercised over more timeless problems of love and betrayal.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44001-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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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