by Betty Webb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2012
A perfect example of the mystery-on-a-soapbox, in which the author’s moral outrage is more compelling than the fiction...
You can never be too careful with murderers, however much you like them.
When full-blooded Pima Jimmy Sisiwan doesn’t show up for work at Desert Investigations, Scottsdale private eye Lena Jones, who considers him her “almost-brother,” finds him locked in a jail cell in tiny Walapai Flats after he asked a little too vigorously why his brother Ted was being held as a material witness in the murder of Ike Donohue, a PR flack for local uranium mining interests. Did Ted set out to avenge the murder of his wife Kimama, an active agitator with V.U.M. (Victims of Uranium Mining)? Lena gets Jimmy released, but her snooping puts a target on her back. Then Roger Tosches, the richest man in the county, is killed before he can complete the purchase of a ranch. It’s possible that both men were killed by Gabe, the cook at the ranch, who has by now confessed to the Donohue murder. When that proves unlikely, Lena chats up the two widows, one grieving, one not, and follows Olivia, a Times reporter, to a meeting of cancer sufferers who’ve been dealing with medical calamities ever since the Nevada nuclear tests over 50 years ago. Despite assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the tests were harmless, half the cast and crew of the 1954 John Wayne film The Conqueror have passed away, and radioactive soil and water contamination have dispatched some family members going back three generations. One more will die before all the angles become clear to Lena and an apparition resembling the Duke himself tips his hat to her and rides off into the sunset.
A perfect example of the mystery-on-a-soapbox, in which the author’s moral outrage is more compelling than the fiction designed to convey it. And Lena (Desert Lost, 2009, etc.), with her bad-choice romances and appalling childhood abuse, is hard to like.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59058-979-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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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