An exhilarating hunt neatly dovetails with the complex heroine’s determination to find her mother’s killer.
A driven reporter works a murder while hiding from a stalker.
Harper McClain’s Savannah paper has been teetering on the verge of bankruptcy as the rapacious owner cuts staff to support her lifestyle. Since a warning from an unknown man that her mother’s killer has her in his sights (A Beautiful Corpse, 2019, etc.), Harper has fled her apartment for a rental on nearby Tybee Island, where she keeps a low profile. Her boredom is alleviated when friends report that up-and-coming music star Xavier Rayne went for a walk on the beach and never returned. Talking their way into Rayne’s rented Tybee mansion, Harper and her photographer meet his girlfriend, actress Cara Brand, his keyboardist, Hunter Carlson, and backup singer Allegra Hanson, all distraught over his disappearance. Harper’s had a special relationship with the police ever since Robert Smith, the detective assigned to her mother’s murder, watched over her when her father remarried, moved, and started a new family. When she exposed Smith as a murderer, that relationship was ruined along with her on-again, off-again love affair with homicide detective Luke Walker. The present case heats up when Rayne’s found shot to death. Harper receives a cryptic message telling her to look into gangster Martin Dowell, who’s just been released from prison, and his lawyer, who turns out to have been Harper’s father. Her source warns her that Dowell may be out for revenge. Continuing to cover Rayne’s murder, Harper finds it difficult to believe that any of the friends the police clearly suspect could have killed him. Fearing for her life, she buys a gun and starts looking for somewhere else to live. Although Harper and Luke have serious doubts about being able to maintain their relationship, they’re still deeply in love, and Luke helps her in every way he can while she tries to escape her mother’s fate.
An exhilarating hunt neatly dovetails with the complex heroine’s determination to find her mother’s killer.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-23588-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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