Lehane (Death at the Old Hotel, 2007, etc.) awards his previous detective, bartender Brian McNulty, a cameo but focuses on...
A biographer is killed inside one of the world’s premier research libraries.
The New York Public Library of the 1990s, edged by wino-infested Bryant Park, would have seemed a more likely scene for murder than the contemporary version, with the park full of “sculpted ivy beds, a small, cheerful merry-go-round, and fashionable Manhattanites sipping lattes from a kiosk,” muses librarian Raymond Ambler, who works in the crime-fiction collection. Still, somebody shot Dr. James Donnelly in the office of Harry Larkin, who runs the Special Collections Division. NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove wants to know who, and he can’t think of anyone better to ask than Ray. Their friendship runs deep. Not only do they share histories involving alcoholic spouses and screwed-up kids—though Ray’s son, John, is a convicted felon while Mike’s daughter, Denise, is just a rebellious teenager—but Ray has helped Mike solve earlier cases. The librarian gives the cop a rundown of the major players in the case: Donnelly, who was preparing a book about crime writer Nelson Yates; professor Maximilian Wagner, Donnelly’s rival biographer; Donnelly’s ex-wife, Kay, who now works for Max; and Max’s wife, Laura Lee McGlynn, the ex-wife of professor Arthur Woods, who died mysteriously in the presence of Yates’s daughter Emily when he, Wagner, the Donnellys, and Yates all worked at Hudson Highlands University. But as Ray’s friendship with fellow librarian Adele Morgan deepens, he finds himself increasingly having to edit his story to Cosgrove. Ray continues to walk the fine line between protecting the innocent and obstructing justice even as the threat of more violence looms.
Lehane (Death at the Old Hotel, 2007, etc.) awards his previous detective, bartender Brian McNulty, a cameo but focuses on the complicated Ray, who looks like a promising newcomer in the talented-amateur ranks.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-00996-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.
The serial killer who terrorized a small British town by kidnapping and murdering five little boys has been locked up for over a decade. So who could have taken 6-year-old Neil Spencer?
"The first forty-eight hours following a disappearance are the most crucial." And yet one of those hours has gone by the time Neil's separated parents realize he never made it from his father's house to his mother's, a short walk he took alone. One of the main investigators of the crime is DI Pete Willis, who cracked a similar case years back and has never quite recovered from it, especially since one of the missing boys was never found. Is there an accomplice still on the loose? As Willis and his colleagues comb the town for clues about the disappearance, a recently widowed novelist and his young son move into what they don't yet know is called "the scary house." Jake is a bright but isolated child who has relied heavily on an imaginary friend and a Packet of Special Things for comfort since he came home from school one day to find his mother's lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. This move is meant to be a much-needed fresh start for the grieving and bewildered father and son, but from the start nothing goes right. On Jake's first day at his new school, the other children draw him into discussion about the missing boy and the Whisper Man who took him. Soon enough, Jake hears whispering too. North's novel pits nasty men submerged in evil against decent men struggling to do good; several father-son pairs reflect the challenges and darker possibilities of this relationship, though plotlines involving female characters are a bit undeveloped.
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31799-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson—and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash—a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece; her sister; her FBI lover, Benton Wesley; her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino; and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in. (Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19597-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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