Smooth, readable, not top-notch Pronzini, but better than much of the noir material out there.
When a stalwart of the Nameless Detective Agency is jailed on homicide charges, his co-workers spring into action.
Jake Runyon has his doubts about new client Verity Daniels, now ensconced in the pricey Bayfront Towers apartment complex, where security is tight, residents are uber-rich, and she claims someone has demanded, out of the blue, that she pay $10,000 or suffer the consequences. She giggles inappropriately, comes on to Jake, tells him a few whoppers about her background, “accidentally” disconnects the trace equipment he puts on her phone, and is left unharmed with the extortion money intact when no one shows up to collect it. After Jake finally dumps this cuckoo client, she retaliates by filing rape and assault charges against him. These come to nothing but inconvenience until she’s found dead, strangled, her head bashed in, Jake’s coat button clasped in her hand. Now he’s indicted for murder. Once she starts digging, Nameless office manager Tamara turns up three old beaus of Verity: her former boss, a married insurance agent; her former fiance, who was about to ditch her before he drowned on a camping trip with her; and her former husband, a broke landscaper, now remarried, who couldn’t put up with her lovers. Meanwhile, Bill, the Nameless agency owner who hasn’t really worked since Hellbox (2012) since he’s been nursing his wife back to stability after her awful abduction experience, steps in to save Runyon. Down the dark streets he goes, maybe a little slower than before—after all, he’s pushing 70—but in exemplary fashion.
Smooth, readable, not top-notch Pronzini, but better than much of the noir material out there.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2566-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A real test for Patterson’s huge audience: If they buy this, they’ll buy anything.
Only a writer of Patterson’s star-wattage could have hoodwinked his publisher into bringing out this unlovely mess, which pits forensic psychologist Alex Cross against two separate serial killers.
It begins with the slaughter of still another of Cross’s professional and romantic partners, FBI agent Betsey Cavalierre, by Cross’s old nemesis, the Mastermind (Roses Are Red, 2000), who instantly phones to taunt his adversary. With still another partner dead, how can Cross go on? But he has to, immediately, because another killer is on the loose—actually, a pair of killers, William and Michael Alexander, teenaged vampires whose murder of two army officers in Golden Gate Park is just a warmup for the carnage to come. As the Mastermind keeps trying to get Cross’s attention by threatening his adorable kids, his grandmother, and everyone else he’s ever known, Patterson, apparently eager to escape the constraints of the low body count in the soapy Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas (p. 694), unleashes the hounds of hell. Under the direction of their dread Sire, the exultant Alexander brothers (“We’re immortal! We’ll never die!”), leave a trail of gory victims in Las Vegas, Savannah, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge before returning to Santa Cruz for a climactic sequence that finally unmasks the ho-hum Sire. The moment the vampire chronicles end, Cross, without missing a beat, turns to that other serial killer, and soon, courtesy of one of his famous profiler’s hunches, has the Mastermind in his sights. Can he hunt down his enemy before the Mastermind exacts a terrible vengeance against somebody else—say, beauteous Jamilla Hughes of San Francisco Homicide—whose death would reduce Cross to babbling despair? The grade-school characterizations of everyone from cops to victims to cackling psychos guarantee that you won’t care a bit.
A real test for Patterson’s huge audience: If they buy this, they’ll buy anything.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-69323-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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