Classic Cussler, offering action in an interesting setting.
Cussler and company add to his fifth series, following the handsome young investigator Isaac Bell as he goes solo for the first time on a case for the Van Dorn Detective Agency.
The year is 1902, and Bell is undercover in West Virginia investigating sabotage in a mine owned by ruthless John "Black Jack" Gleason, owner of the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company. The tall, blond-haired Bell stands out among hard-worn immigrant mining crews, all the more so since he is nearly killed while attempting to stop a runaway train of tipple cars. Cussler and Scott dig up interesting historical scene-setting factoids, including references to esoteric classic automobiles, Pittsburgh’s posh Duquesne Club, and the history of massacres and brutal strikebreaking as unions begin to organize. The action shifts from the dangerous depths of a coal mine to Wall Street, to a confrontation in a tunnel being dug for the New York subway and to a riverboat battle between two paddle-wheelers. There are deft characterizations—Bell’s detective crew, Kisley and Fulton, explosives and muscle; Wish Clarke, a "crack sleuth" occasionally in the bottle; Bell’s nemesis, Henry Clay, illegitimate offspring of a bohemian artist, rejected Van Dorn protégé and now an amoral double agent; Jim Higgins, pacifist union organizer, and his beautiful, firebrand radical sister, Mary; and Archibald Angel Abbott IV, master of disguise—and the requisite hard-boiled dialogue like, "[You’ll] be waiting in Hell for the next batch to come down and tell you who was laughing. Drop 'em and elevate!" Clay morphs into Claggart, agent provocateur allied with nefarious monopolist manipulator Judge James Congdon, and Bell ricochets from West Virginia to Pittsburgh, New York City and Cincinnati, leaving in his wake gun battles, knife fights and explosions—it helps that he’s heir to a Boston banking fortune, has friends with private railcars and need not rely on expense accounting—working to prevent Clay-Claggart-Congdon from instigating a war that will wipe out striking miners and their families.
Classic Cussler, offering action in an interesting setting.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16177-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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