A topical crime thriller makes up for deficiencies in suspense with sensitive character portraits.
An international thriller explores the impact of counterfeit pharmaceutical smuggling.
In this, her fourth novel, former political scientist Holden draws on her expertise to weave a tale of global intrigue. After a prologue in Nigeria shows the death of Toyosi, a young diabetic girl, the action shifts to New Jersey where Frank Hughes, an art professor, grieves over the AIDS-related death of his lover Earl. Soon Frank too is dead in an apparent suicide. What links these two stories is the possibility that both Toyosi and Earl died from taking counterfeit medication, perhaps supplied by the same global syndicate. Could Frank have been killed because he knew too much? Unraveling this mystery falls to several innocent bystanders, notably the young painter Cece Gardner, Frank’s friend and colleague, and Babatunde Akanbi, Toyosi’s computer-whiz older brother. Although Cece and Babatunde never meet, their diligent work takes them to the heart of the mystery, ultimately placing each in grave danger. While the final quarter of the novel reveals Holden’s skill with action scenes, for the most part she favors suspense over surprise, revealing early on the main villains’ identities and the basic details of their crimes. This mode of exposition poses specific challenges and the narrative sometimes slackens as characters struggle to discover what is, for the reader, old news. Added strain on the plot, especially in the New Jersey scenes, comes from the excessive proliferation of minor characters, mostly as foils for the heroes. What makes this counterpointing unnecessary is the genuine sensitivity with which Holden draws her protagonists. Holden’s academic experience evidently includes minute observation of the culture of academic institutions, and nearly every detail in her portraits of Cece and Frank rings true. Her vivid portrayal of Frank is especially impressive given that it is almost entirely constructed from suggestive details retained in the memories of the character’s surviving friends. By the end of the novel, readers will feel as if they, too, have spent years of collegiality and friendship with this gruff, determined figure. Exploring Frank and Cece’s multifaceted personalities is the novel’s most genuine and compelling mystery.
A topical crime thriller makes up for deficiencies in suspense with sensitive character portraits.Pub Date: March 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450226912
Page Count: 256
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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