Blunt but expertly paced and viscerally effective, with many surprises and genuine chills.
Popular suspense writer Andrew Thomas (Desert Places, 2004), still wrongly believed to be a serial killer, lives in hiding but can’t escape fan(atic)s or a copycat killer.
In 1996, Andrew’s long-lost twin Orson, aided by a psychopathic accomplice named Luther Kite, killed their mother and a man named Walter Lancing. The seemingly ironclad case against Andrew sent him on the run. This sequel unfolds in short chapters from multiple perspectives; Andrew’s point-of-view cuts are written in a noir first person and addressed directly to the reader. Orson is dead, but a revitalized Luther Kite cuts a grisly swath down the East Coast. Shrewdly employing the modus operandi ascribed to the wrongly accused writer, Luther kidnaps and tortures both Andrew’s former fiancée, New York book editor Karen Prescott, and Lancing’s widow, Elizabeth. Along the way he commits several other crimes, the most vividly described being his gutting of a discourteous department store employee. Meanwhile, oddball aspiring writer Horace Boone finds Andrew’s remote lair and, deducing the writer’s identity, begins to formulate a master plagiarism plan. In the newspaper, Andrew reads about a brutal murder attributed to him and immediately suspects Luther. He reluctantly sets off in pursuit. Brilliant young police detective Violet King is also on this case, her first big one. Instinct tells her that the perp is more likely Luther than Andrew. Vi visits his elderly parents, Rufus and Maxine Kite, a near-fatal decision she lives to painfully regret. When Vi hooks up with Andrew, the story seems to be unfolding on a predictable path, but it’s only the beginning of cliffhangers and nail-biting twists.
Blunt but expertly paced and viscerally effective, with many surprises and genuine chills.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-31799-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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