by Daniel Pyne ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2010
With dialogue that sings and action that sizzles, this is a prime candidate for the big screen.
Character is key in this deliciously edgy thriller, screenwriter Pyne’s (The Manchurian Candidate) first novel.
A snapshot: Two 14-year-olds in Santa Barbara, Calif. Jack Baylor, a total innocent, is desperate for the approval of menacing Tory Geller. Somehow, he gets it. Six years later, they’re surfing together. When a kid grabs his wave, Tory goes ballistic, beating him to a pulp but also (accidentally) blinding Jack in one eye. Fast-forward 15 years. Jack, Los Angeles actor and inveterate bed-hopper, has just had sex with Hannah, Tory’s trust-fund wife, ended their affair and is relaxing at a Mojave Desert motel. Let the games begin. A beautiful woman called Mona walks into the bar. Jack figures her for his next conquest. They’re not alone. There’s a runaway teen (Rachel); some Marines; and three middle-aged women consoling themselves with margaritas. None of them are wallpaper; all will be used in important ways, evidence of the author’s sweet economy. Back to Jack, for this is his story. He has bedded Mona, even been moved by her vulnerability, until he learns she has two kids. Time to run. He sneaks away caddishly; soon after, Tory happens upon Mona and the kids outside Jack’s room. Jack, on a back road, is ambushed by an army of cops. Mona and the kids are missing, presumed dead, and Jack’s motel room is drenched in blood. It would be wrong to reveal much more, but the surprises come fast and furious: They include Jack’s breakout from jail, his unwanted company (Rachel again) and their trip to a border town. Over them looms the avenging shadow of Tory, armed and dangerous. What went down in Room 203? That’s part of the suspense, but the biggest part is waiting to see if Jack, with Rachel as his improbable mentor, will finally become a stand-up guy, taking responsibility for his actions, running no more.
With dialogue that sings and action that sizzles, this is a prime candidate for the big screen.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-573-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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 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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