by Brent Ghelfi ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2011
Ghelfi's punchy noir prose holds his fourth Volk novel (The Verona Cable, 2009, etc.) together, and the plot is appealingly...
For brooding Russian agent Alexei Volkovoy, the murder of a beautiful journalist is personal.
On a bitter winter night in Moscow, "Volk" gets the news that he has long expected: Internationally acclaimed Russian journalist Katarina Mironova, aka Kato, has been shot dead in the street. Writer Ilya Jakobs, the elderly dissident who informs him, points out that Kato is the 22nd journalist murdered under Putin. It's unsettling to Volk that Ilya senses (or knows) the closeness of his relationship with Kato, which he thought he'd kept secret. Similarly, Volk's vulnerable lover Valya intuits his intimacy with the beautiful Kato and asks whether they'd had an affair. Volk lies as much to protect her as himself, but his close call doesn't prevent him from investigating her murder, which includes many flashbacks to their smoldering relationship and the work that ultimately cost her her life. Ironically, Volk's visit to the Kremlin and a meeting with an imperious figure he calls "The General" leads to his being officially given the assignment. Meanwhile, brutal American agent Grayson Stone, who heads an elite intelligence squad outside the strictures of the NSA or CIA, is methodically torturing Delveccio, a coarse crime boss he's convinced holds the key to murdered drug runners. When Volk learns the identity of the assassin, his discovery puts him squarely in the cross hairs of Stone's scorched-earth determination.
Ghelfi's punchy noir prose holds his fourth Volk novel (The Verona Cable, 2009, etc.) together, and the plot is appealingly twisty, albeit full of stock characters and developments.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59058-925-0
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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 Lorna Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.
Too much free time leads a New Hampshire bookseller into yet another case of murder.
Now that Tricia Miles has Pixie Poe and Mr. Everett practically running her bookstore, Haven’t Got a Clue, she finds herself at loose ends. Her wealthy sister, Angelica, who in the guise of Nigela Ricita has invested heavily in making Stoneham a bookish tourist attraction, is entering the amateur competition for the Great Booktown Bake-Off. So Tricia, who’s recently taken up baking as a hobby, decides to join her and spends a lot of time looking for the perfect cupcake recipe. A visit to another bookstore leaves Tricia witnessing a nasty argument between owner Joyce Widman and next-door neighbor Vera Olson over the trimming of tree branches that hang over Joyce’s yard—also overheard by new town police officer Cindy Pearson. After Tricia accepts Joyce’s offer of some produce from her garden, they find Vera skewered by a pitchfork, and when Police Chief Grant Baker arrives, Joyce is his obvious suspect. Ever since Tricia moved to Stoneham, the homicide rate has skyrocketed (Poisoned Pages, 2018, etc.), and her history with Baker is fraught. She’s also become suspicious about the activities at Pets-A-Plenty, the animal shelter where Vera was a dedicated volunteer. Tricia’s offered her expertise to the board, but president Toby Kingston has been less than welcoming. With nothing but baking on her calendar, Tricia has plenty of time to investigate both the murder and her vague suspicions about the shelter. Plenty of small-town friendships and rivalries emerge in her quest for the truth.
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0272-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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