Despite a perfunctory windup of the multiple felonies, the meatiest and most straightforward of Suze’s three procedurals...
A mean outbreak of E.coli has thinned the ranks of the Chicago Police Department so ruthlessly that Officers Suze Figueroa and Norm Bennis, along with all their other colleagues who aren’t in the hospital or the morgue, are doing double duty. Besides looking for a thief who’s been picking the pockets of upscale shoppers while they watch noontime cosmetics demonstrations at the city’s most exclusive stores, they’ve been appointed acting detectives in a series of killings of homeless alcoholics. Smarting under the constraints of time and money—the department won’t approve the pricey forensics tests she’s convinced would narrow the field of suspects dramatically—Suze prepares to comb the city for the perp. Stretched to the limit by her caseload and the lack of support she’s getting from her superiors, she doesn’t realize that she ought to start by searching the attic of the home she’s sharing with her brother-in-law, Robert Birch, where she’s helping to nurse her brain-injured sister Sheryl back to health. A dangerous lowlife has gone to earth in Robert’s house, prowled the bedrooms in the family’s absence, eavesdropped on their conversations, eaten their food, worn their clothes, and is now waiting for one of Suze’s late nights at work so that he can have some real fun with aphasic, partially paralyzed Sheryl and her two daughters.
Despite a perfunctory windup of the multiple felonies, the meatiest and most straightforward of Suze’s three procedurals (Good Cop, Bad Cop, 1998, etc.) to date. D’Amato’s headline sleuth, Second City journalist Cat Marsala, had better watch her back.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-86564-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Striking a far less hysterical tone than in The Shining, King has written his most sweeping horror novel in The Stand, though it may lack the spinal jingles of Salem's Lot. In part this is because The Stand, with its flow of hundreds of brand-name products, is a kind of inventory of American culture. "Superflu" has hit the U.S. and the world, rapidly wiping out the whole of civilization—excepting the one-half of one percent who are immune. Superflu is a virus with a shifting antigen base; that is, it can kill every type of antibody the human organism can muster against it. Immunity seems to be a gift from God—or the Devil. The Devil himself has become embodied in a clairvoyant called Randall Flagg, a phantom-y fellow who walks highways and is known variously as "the dark man" or "the Walking Dude" and who has set up a new empire in Las Vegas where he rules by fear, his hair giving off sparks while he floats in the lotus position. He is very angry because the immune folks in the Free Zone up at Boulder have sent a small force against him; they get their message from Him (God) through a dying black crone named Abigail, who is also clairvoyant. There are only four in this Boulder crew, led by Stu Redman from East Texas, who is in love with pregnant Fran back in the Free Zone. Good and Evil come to an atomic clash at the climax, the Book of Revelations working itself out rather too explicitly. But more importantly, there are memorable scenes of the superflu spreading hideously, Fifth Avenue choked with dead cars, Flagg's minions putting up fresh lightbulbs all over Vegas. . . . Some King fans will be put off by the pretensions here; most will embrace them along with the earthier chilis.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1978
ISBN: 0307743683
Page Count: 1450
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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