The reason he never met her for the Las Vegas weekend he'd invited her to, ex-colleague Charlie East explains to rolling-stone computer newshound Georgina Powers (Frame Grabber, 1993, etc.) after they've met at McCarran Airport and flown together back to Heathrow, is that he got into a high-stakes poker game he couldn't leave till he was sure of the pot: a million dollars' worth of drams, state-of-the-art computer chips. By this time Georgina has already met two of the other principals who'll figure in Charlie's oh-so-simple-sounding plan to convert the chips to cash and pay her back the ú50,000 he owes her: Hungarian gambler Pal Kuthy of AO Electronix, Charlie's potential buyer; and Shinichro Saito, Georgina's lover, who turns out to be the original seller of the chips. The only missing link is Hiroshi Sano, soon identified as the ``Al Sony'' who lost the chips to Charlie in the first place, even though he was under his company's orders to swap them for some prime Colombian blow. But the Colombians, together with the Japanese, Charlie, and Georgina, are all out of luck, because before Charlie can turn them around, the chips are hijacked from his safe-deposit box—the first of many, many reversals in this spirited round of musical drams. Instead of periodically carting in new characters, Danks just keeps peeling back more layers from her tiny cast's masks. (Those drams are not what they seem either.) The dizzying result is like a video-game version of The Big Sleep programmed by David Mamet—so incessantly brutal and funny (except to the heroine, who spends an awful lot of time getting punched out by people who call themselves her friends) that it ends up being exhausting to read.
Pub Date: Dec. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11355-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Chilling.
A glaciologist seeks refuge in Antarctica.
A nearly two-year stint at the British Antarctic Survey’s base on South Georgia Island, halfway between the Antarctic mainland and the Falklands, seems like the perfect job for Cambridge graduate Felicity Lloyd. The landscape is breathtaking, the wildlife like no other in the world, and ever changing glaciers provide vital opportunities to investigate the effects of climate change on humankind’s future. But Felicity has another secret reason for choosing to pursue her professional passion in what may be the most remote place on Earth. She hopes that Freddie, who’s stalked her nearly her whole adult life, will never find her there. The trouble is, she can’t remember much about Freddie or the reason for his obsession with her; her memories are jumbled and distorted, with chunks of time missing from her consciousness the size of the icebergs she studies. Dr. Joe Grant, the psychologist she sees in Cambridge, tries to help her recover her lost moments, but just when he seems to be getting close, Felicity shuts him down, preferring to work out her problems alone in the frigid south. Leaving Felicity to handle her issues on her own, however, may no longer be an option for Joe once his mother, DI Delilah Jones, begins to connect the deaths of some of Cambridge’s homeless to Felicity’s blackouts. Bolton (The Craftsman, 2018, etc.) provides her readers with shivers worthy of her setting, although true aficionados of the psychological thriller may find the secret of Felicity’s illness a bit too easy to recognize.
Chilling.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30005-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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