Stout's Carolina Skeletons (1988) won an Edgar for Best First Novel. But his fourth (after Hell Gate, 1990, and Night of the Ice Storm, 1991) is better—far better: a beautifully modulated, genuinely moving tale of kidnapping and murder in upstate New York. Bessemer Gazette executive editor Will Schafer, a relatively minor figure in Night of the Ice Storm, takes center stage here when he's sent to cover the kidnapping in nearby Long Creek of five-year-old Jamie Brokaw, son of the richest man in the county, a cable-TV entrepreneur. The paper had sent old Fran Spicer, a recovering rummy, to cover the crime, but—in a touch that sets the story's melancholy mood—Fran was found badly hurt and apparently drunk in a car wreck outside Long Creek. In town, Will finds an old FBI pal heading up the case, which is good news since the local cops, with one notable exception, seem as hard and possibly as crooked as they come. Will helps the FBI agent interpret various ransom notes, but when Fran dies in the hospital, the newspaperman turns to a friendly nurse (for whom he falls hard, despite his wedding band) to help him sort out his growing suspicions (based on well-seeded clues) that Fran was murdered: Is it possible that her death and the kidnapping are related? Meanwhile, we share the terror of the kidnapped boy as he's buried alive in an old water heater, and his elation as he's rescued by the hermit of the title- -as well as his horror when the cops take the hermit for a kidnapper and shoot him dead. The FBI man and the cops now seem to consider the case closed—until, in a tense finale, Will, putting all the pieces together, finds himself running for his life in the woods, the real kidnapper shooting at him to kill. Remarkably satisfying, with wonderfully complex characters, a challenging puzzle, and plenty of surprises and suspense. Readers will savor this one.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-89296-503-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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