Like a contemporary Anne Perry, D’Amato looses the dogs of suspense against an all-too-plausible scenario of epidemic social...
An expertly muckraking thriller that exposes a particularly vicious baby-selling racket.
The good news for surgical pathologist Dooley McSweeney is that his adopted son Teddy doesn’t really have leukemia; his worrisome infection is only mononucleosis. The bad news is that Teddy’s bone sample shows the telltale fluorescence caused only by tetracycline—an antibiotic Dooley and his lawyer wife Claudia have never given Teddy, and one surely unavailable in the grungy Russian orphanage from which they rescued him four years ago. As Dooley starts his painful search for the truth about his son’s birthright, celebrity reporter Gabrielle Coulter is making an equally painful discovery in Moscow: Someone has murdered her videographer, Justin Craig, and destroyed their tapes showing conditions at a local orphanage. Slogans the killers have scrawled on the wall suggest that the perps were patriotic zealots who didn’t want Mother Russia to look bad, but Gabrielle soon suspects a far more sinister motive behind the killing. It’s only a matter of time, of course, before her search for the truth converges with Dooley’s, and neither of the subplots D’Amato (Hard Road, 2001, etc.) employs to delay the payoff—baleful glimpses at the inner circle of Windsor House, an adoption mill that will stop at nothing to increase its profits, and scarcely less teasing glimpses at an FBI operation against Windsor House—is particularly compelling. But her trademark skill at magnifying the ordinary anxieties of her characters to nightmare proportions keeps the story moving swiftly, and only the hardest hearts will be able to resist the tear-jerking tug of her Web-based epigraphs (“By the way, my doctor says multiple sclerosis in the mother doesn’t hurt the baby or pass on to the baby. God be with you”).
Like a contemporary Anne Perry, D’Amato looses the dogs of suspense against an all-too-plausible scenario of epidemic social injustice. The heart-rending, page-turning result is irresistible.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30024-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to...
Rookie Twelve Sleep County Game Warden Joe Pickett’s not much of a shot, and he’s been looking like a goat ever since poacher Ote Keeley got the drop on him with his own gun during a routine arrest. But at least he’s doing better than Ote, who’s turned up dead on the woodpile outside Joe’s house. Joe’s search in Crazy Woman Creek canyon for the two outfitters and guides Ote was most recently partnered with ends happily, though violently, and suddenly Joe is the man of the hour. Longtime County Sheriff Bud Barnum nervously asks Joe’s assurance that he’s not going to support neighboring game warden Wacey Hedeman’s challenge in the upcoming election; trophy wife Aimee Kensinger, who really likes men in uniforms, invites Joe’s family to housesit her palatial digs for three weeks; and wily Vern Dunnegan, Joe’s predecessor, wants Joe to join him in pulling down big bucks from InterWest resources, the fat-cat corporation for whose gas pipeline Vern’s lining up local support. All this good news is only a front, of course, for a monstrous assault on Joe’s livelihood, his integrity, and his family—and incidentally on an inoffensive species long assumed extinct. In response, Joe promises one of the bad guys that “things are going to get real western,” and that’s exactly what happens in the satisfyingly action-filled climax.
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to imagine tourism-marketing exec Box topping his debut.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14748-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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