Next book

A FIELD OF DARKNESS

Read’s sensational debut features spot-on descriptions of upstate-downstate conflicts, strong characterizations and a...

Snobbery, bigotry and cultural clashes are brought to a boil by malicious talk of an old murder.

Madeline Dare, the poor relation of an old North Shore Long Island WASP family, is a child of oft-divorced parents brought up in a world of privilege even as the money trickles away. Married to Dean Bauer, an inventive farm son who’s often away working in Canada, Madeline hates her job on a small Syracuse paper—and hates everything else about Syracuse. On a visit to the family farm, her father-in-law shows her dog tags he uncovered in a field where two unidentified young girls were found 19 years before, their throats cut, posed in a bizarre tableau. The tags bear the name of her favorite cousin, Lapthorne Townsend. In an attempt to prove his innocence, Madeline starts investigating the murders without involving the police. The girls had been seen at the State Fair with two soldiers from Camp Drum, but the silhouettes they posed for have disappeared. When Madeline finds the artist murdered, clues at the crime scene lead her to realize that a serial killer is at work. She and her friend Ellis shuttle between her relatives’ crumbling estates and lowlife bars before more murders bring to light the shattering truth.

Read’s sensational debut features spot-on descriptions of upstate-downstate conflicts, strong characterizations and a fascinating plot.

Pub Date: May 8, 2006

ISBN: 0-89296-023-X

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006

Next book

THE PARIS DIVERSION

A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.

“It is a dangerous time to be alive.” Indeed, as this fast-paced thriller by seasoned mysterian Pavone (The Travelers, 2016, etc.) proves.

A siren wails in Paris, a once-rare sound often heard in these times of terror. It’s gone off because a jihadi has strapped a bomb to himself and is standing in front of the Louvre, “in the epicenter of Western civilization,” waiting for his moment. But is he a jihadi? Who’s put him up to this dastardly deed, and why? That’s for Kate Moore, deep-cover CIA agent, “sidewalk-swimming in a sea of expat moms,” to suss out. Kate lives in a shadow world, so hidden away that even her hedge-fund-master husband doesn’t have a clue about what she does: “Dexter has been forced to accept that she’s entitled to her secrets,” Pavone writes, adding, “He’s had plenty of his own.” Indeed, and in the shadowy parallel world of speculative finance, he’s teamed up with a fast-living entrepreneur who wants nothing more than to become superrich and run off with his “assistant-concubine.” Hunter Forsyth is about to announce a huge deal, but suddenly he’s disappeared, whisked away by shadowy people who, by the thin strings of suspense, have something to do with that bomb across town. So does a vengeful young mom, strapped to a useless husband and bent on payback for a long-ago slight. All this is red meat to Kate, who’s tired of the domestic life, no matter how much a sham, and is happier than a clam when “running her network of journalists, bloggers, influencers, as well as drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and cops, plus diplomats and soldiers, maitre d’s and concierges and bartenders and shopkeepers.” With all those players, mercenaries, and assorted bad guys thrown into the mix, you just know that the storyline is going to be knotty, and it resolves in a messy spatter of violence that’s trademark Pavone and decidedly not for the squeamish.

A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.

Pub Date: May 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5247-6150-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Next book

THE BODY FARM

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

Close Quickview