by David Housewright ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018
A fast-moving, dialogue-driven tale so effortlessly and irresistibly spun that you may well finish it before you notice that...
“Roving troubleshooter” Rushmore McKenzie agrees to look into a case of industrial sabotage and ends up shooting a lot more trouble than he expected.
McKenzie’s poker buddy Ian Gotz, an accountant, may be better at keeping books than at filling inside straights, but even he knows something’s gone seriously wrong for Erin Peterson, the friend he wishes were much more. The founder of Salsa Girl Salsa has evidently been riding too high for the taste of whomever's squirted superglue into the locks in her latest manufacturing plant. A prank, she tells McKenzie when he drops by to ask how she is and she realizes that her aspiring lover has given him the news she shared in confidence. But McKenzie (What the Dead Leave Behind, 2017, etc.) brushes that explanation away: The plant is in the middle of nowhere, and there’s zero chance that teenage kids would have taken that much trouble to mess with someone they didn’t know and couldn’t watch. Soon enough McKenzie’s suspicions of some darker motive are confirmed when someone superglues the door locks on a delivery truck that has to get the refrigerated salsa to Minnesota stores before it warms up and spoils. Since Erin has never had time for a boyfriend, let alone an ex-lover with a grudge, McKenzie focuses on the obscenely rich Bignell family, whose wastrel scion, Randy Bignell-Sax, loaned Erin the money she needed to launch Salsa Girl, and whose family-held company, Minnesota Foods, distributes her six flavors. Although a bombing at the plant jolts McKenzie, it’ll take several more nudges before he realizes that Salsa Girl has been built on a foundation that’s been rotten from the beginning and that bigger threats are on the way.
A fast-moving, dialogue-driven tale so effortlessly and irresistibly spun that you may well finish it before you notice that nobody has died, except for a couple of faceless gangbangers executed offstage, and that the elaborately choreographed denouement doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09453-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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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New York Times Bestseller
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 J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
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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