by Clare Francis ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
Joanna Trollope with a bit of blood.
Extramarital indulgence with a long-lost flame makes just pots and pots of trouble for an otherwise blameless British businessman.
It just couldn’t be more troubling, really. Here’s poor Hugh Wellesley, soldiering away, trying to keep the family glassworks from falling into the hands of a heartless corporation with plans to close the scrappy, hardworking company that Wellesley’s dad set up and send its loyal workers out into the cold post-Thatcher world. Then, just as Hugh’s almost got the financing scraped together from bloodsucking investors for a buyout, the corpse of Sylvie, a half-French nymphet who bewitched him years before and then bewitched him again just a few months ago, has washed up in the river Dart, stabbed and wrapped in polythene. What could have possessed Hugh to let himself be distracted by that dishy but drug-riddled Gallic siren? Well, of course, Hugh blames himself for spending far too much time and energy on the business, leaving him weakened and vulnerable, but he can’t help also blaming his wife Ginny just a bit. Asthmatic, hyperorganized, far too interested in the shallow world of charity events and lesser nobles, absorbed in the endless upkeep of the country house and the city house and the house in Provence, spending zillions faster than Hugh can make it, Ginny is just not doing her part in this time of crisis. Too bad they couldn’t have led the happy life of Hugh’s brother David, a small-town GP whose frumpy wife Mary seems so very supportive. And now here come the Exeter police to drag Hugh away from those important banking meetings just at the worst possible time. Is David a suspect? Alas, not a very successful sneak, he had been seen puddling about on the family yacht with Sylvie, and he can’t account for all the time around her murder. But neither can the possibly psychotic Ginny. There will be mild surprises in this curiously dated thriller from the author of Deceit (2001).
Joanna Trollope with a bit of blood.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-290-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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