Brookhouse (Dear Otto, 1995, etc.) writes confidently and unobtrusively about authentic issues.
A quiet novel of personal and seasonal change set in a small town in New Hampshire.
Nicki Groh seems to have it all. She’s about to graduate from high school, and although she just missed being valedictorian, she’s off to Princeton in the fall. But a week before graduation she agrees to attend an evening boat party with Willie Boots, a hot-shot pitcher for the baseball team and son of a prominent businessman. Willie tries to rape Nicki, who barely escapes. She swims to shore and is rescued by Russell Blatt, a former classmate who’s about to leave for greener—or at least warmer—pastures. Nicki decides to go with him, not simply to escape the Willies of the world but also to get away from a heated but dead-end sexual relationship she was having with the high-school math teacher and the pressures of going to an Ivy League school she’s not at all sure she wants to attend. Nicki and Russell, who much to Nicki’s chagrin is gay, travel to North Carolina and find jobs waiting tables at a summer resort. Back in New Hampshire, village life begins to unravel. Nicki’s adoptive parents are at first concerned about and then resigned to her absence. Meanwhile, Willie’s father grows estranged from his wife, who in a spasm of midlife unpredictability decides she wants to become an actress. Willie gets a summer job as a security guard and finds himself entangled, both literally and metaphorically, with Joan Doyle, who casually dispenses sexual favors to local high-school boys. When Nicki comes back at the end of the novel, she’s serene, mature and pregnant.
Brookhouse (Dear Otto, 1995, etc.) writes confidently and unobtrusively about authentic issues.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57962-179-7
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
Patterson's thrillers (Virgin, 1980; Black Market, 1986) have plummeted in quality since his promising debut in The Thomas Berryman Number (1976)—with this latest being the sorriest yet: a clanky and witless policer about a criminal mastermind and the cop sworn to take him down. Aside from watching sympathetic homicide dick John ("Stef") Stefanovich comeing to terms with a wheelchair-bound life—legacy of a shotgun blast to the back by drug-and-gun-running archfiend Alexandre St.-Germain—the major interest here lies in marvelling at the author's trashing of fiction convention. The whopper comes early: although St.-Germain is explicity described as being machine-gunned to death by three vigilante cops in a swank brothel (". . .a submachine gun blast nearly ripped off the head of Alexandre St.-Germain"; "The mobster's head and most of his neck had been savaged by the machine-gun volley. The body looked desecrated. . ."), before you know it this latter-day Moriarty is stepping unscathed out of an airplane. What gives? Authorial cheating, that's what—thinly glossed over with some mumbling later on about a "body double." Not that St.-Germain's ersatz death generated much suspense anyway, with subsequent action focusing on, among other items, the gory killings of assorted mob bosses by one of the vigilante cops, and Stef's viewing of pornographic tapes confiscated from that brothel. But readers generous enough to plod on will get to read about the newly Lazarus-ized St.-Germain's crass efforts to revitalize and consolidate the world's crime syndicates ("the Midnight Club"), Stef's predictable tumble for a sexy true-crime writer, and how (isn't one miracle enough for Patterson?) at book's end Stef walks again and gets to embrace a rogue cop who's murdered several people. Ironsides with a badge and a lobotomy.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1988
ISBN: 0446676411
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.
Sparks fly as a woman with extraordinary abilities fights her attraction to a dangerous freelance consultant.
Dr. Kendra Michaels has worked with former FBI Agent Adam Lynch before (Double Blind, 2018), but she’s furious with him for getting her tossed out of Afghanistan after she sustained a minor wound while trying to root out corruption. Kendra, who was blind until an experimental operation restored her sight at 20, has highly developed senses of smell, hearing, and spatial awareness that she’s used to help the FBI and CIA in many difficult cases. Now, as she returns to the U.S., they have another one she can’t resist investigating. Elaine Wessler and Ronald Kim, both staff members at her old school, the Woodward Academy for the Physically Disabled in Oceanside, California, have been found murdered for no apparent reason, and FBI Special Agent Michael Griffin is anxious to use her skills and inside knowledge. Elaine had been fostering an unusual guide dog, Harley, who's had problems adjusting since the child he was working with was killed in a gas-main explosion. Now that Elaine is gone, his unearthly howls are upsetting the students. Kendra talks her best friend, Olivia, who’s blind, into sharing custody of Harley until they can find him the right home. Meanwhile, she turns up clues the FBI team missed and is rewarded for her efforts with a bomb planted in her car. It turns out to be fake, but it’s still a potent warning to walk away. Returning from Afghanistan to help Kendra, Lynch finds her still angry with him and intent on resisting his charms. Her friend Jessie Mercado, a private eye, turns up to help extricate her from a dangerous situation and sticks around to join the hunt for the killers. It will take all of them, including Harley, to solve the violent, complex case and get the school Kendra loves back on track.
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6292-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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