A deep dive into the deepest secrets of a one-family town and its leading family that sometimes gets murky, even exhausting,...
Gruley bids farewell to Starvation Lake, Michigan (The Skeleton Box, 2012, etc.), to explore the equally grim kidnapping of an autistic teenager who shares the same state and much the same state of mind.
Danny Peters was something of a trial even before he disappeared. Lacking much of an affinity for other people, he was interested mainly in dragonflies, computers, and Wallace Stevens. Now he’s gone off with someone who promised him a milkshake, and his mother and stepfather are agonizing about how to raise the quixotic ransom of $5.145 million by the impossibly tight deadline. Both of them have reason to worry about their ability to pull together in their hour of need. Pete Peters, who owns a medical marijuana dispensary, is hiding his off-again professional relationship with Slim, the go-between who supplied him with better product for less money than his legal sellers until all of a sudden he stopped. Carey Peters, newly promoted executive assistant, finance, at Pressman Logistics in Chicago, allowed her boss, Randall Pressman, to take her out to dinner to celebrate and then slept with him, then refused his encore invitations and responded to his attempts to trash her at work by stealing some sensitive documents that reveal his own illegal activity and demanding a hefty payoff for her silence. Working variously at odds with each other and the authorities they’ve defied the kidnapper by calling, Carey and Pete try to raise the ransom by leaning on Carey’s hateful mother, monstrous town matriarch Serenity Meredith Maas Bleak; Oly O’Nally, the boss who fired Pete from his brokerage firm; and, of course, Randall Pressman for the cash. They all turn out to have agendas of their own. So do Danny’s ex-con birth father, Jeff Bledsoe, Pete’s employee Dulcy Pérez, and Pressman’s henchman Quartz—not to mention Lt. Katya Malone, of the Bleak Harbor PD, and Allen Locke, of the FBI.
A deep dive into the deepest secrets of a one-family town and its leading family that sometimes gets murky, even exhausting, but is never less than enthralling. And you’ll finish it with a wonderful sense that you’ve finally come up for air.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0468-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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