Paul’s a memorable lead, but it’s the largely unknown killer who makes the grandest impression.
A sheriff and his ex-detective pal chase a vindictive serial killer menacing North Carolina’s Outer Banks in this debut thriller.
Dare County Sheriff Martin Tate doesn’t have much experience with homicide. When cops find the body of nurse Lisa Utley in her ransacked home, Tate seeks help from his friend and former Ohio detective, Paul Treadwell. Paul, now running the Brown Pelican, a Duck, North Carolina, restaurant, after he and his wife, Megan, won the lottery, can offer Tate insights, having investigated more murder cases. The latest crime scene looks like a robbery gone wrong, but the woman’s photo ID lying atop an open phone book—displaying an ad for the hospital where she worked—seems suspicious. There’s also a burned CD in the stereo with only a single song. About a month later, the Treadwells’ morning beach walk is cut short by the discovery of insurance salesman Ted Blankenship’s apparently drowned body. A suicide or accident, perhaps, but back at his house are signs of a murderer’s M.O.: a phone book with Ted’s Yellow Pages ad, a newspaper article featuring the salesman, and a single-song CD. Readers know, courtesy of the killer’s perspective, that someone, motivated by payback, is meticulously stalking his prey. As the psychopath continues his killing spree, Paul and the sheriff remain dangerously unaware that the murderer’s list of impending victims includes Megan. This novel is first and foremost a mystery, not revealing the killer’s reason for vengeance or Megan’s connection to it until late in the story. Tate’s a bit of a cliché as the coffee-drinking, donut-munching sheriff, but Paul is a solid protagonist—with the smarts of an investigator and the charm of an everyday man who jokes with Megan and Pelican chef Gunny Books. The point of viewof the murderer, too, is effective; he’s terrifyingly scrupulous, and his self-appointed pseudonym, Mr. Swaylon, even gives him a personality. The good guys too easily unveil Swaylon’s true identity, but Beckett does address the killer’s ego. Swaylon’s prone to occasional bouts of stupidity, such as taunting Tate with a phone call, but, as in the case of so many serial killers, who’ll understand his vengeful rationale if he’s never caught?
Paul’s a memorable lead, but it’s the largely unknown killer who makes the grandest impression.Pub Date: April 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5304-7018-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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