The crime spree is relatively straightforward, but the devil is in the details, and Fowler’s details are hilariously...
Back from the prequel that followed them to 1969 (Bryant and May: Hall of Mirrors, 2018), the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit settle in to another round of doing what they do best in present-day London: creating chaos while bringing an unusually single-minded killer to book.
On normal excursions, the Ladies of the Night meet to map the colonies of the bats they’re trying to preserve on Hampstead Heath. But insomniac Sparrow (nee Candice) Martin’s brief glimpse of a man on the Heath wearing a pig mask and attacking another man while she’s separated from the other Ladies sets her latest outing apart. Even though Sparrow takes flight, the bat journal she accidentally leaves behind allows Hugo Blake to track her down with no trouble after he’s finished hanging Dhruv Cheema from his ankles amid the branches of a willow tree and stabbing him to death. Not surprisingly, the ghoulish case is sent to the PCU, where the killing of bank employee Luke Dickinson under very different circumstances but with a suspiciously similar weapon persuades DCI Arthur Bryant, the master of arcane knowledge whose sources of information seem to include every seedy character in London, that the killer, who seems to prefer striking at 4 a.m., has other victims in mind—up to three others, by Bryant’s precise reckoning. Since no one outside the PCU shares Bryant’s unshakeable conviction, it’ll be up to his longtime friend and partner, DCI John May; Operations Director Janice Longbright; DS Meera Mangeshkar; DS Colin Bimsley; and the unit’s lesser lights to establish not only who the killer is, but what his victims have in common and where he’s likely to strike next. Complications ensue along with the wackiest digressions in the business, at least one gobsmacking coincidence, and two deaths that will catch even the most devoted fans of this wacky franchise by surprise.
The crime spree is relatively straightforward, but the devil is in the details, and Fowler’s details are hilariously devilish.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-48582-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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