Madame Karitska is an appealing figure, and Gilman handles the psychic aspects of these episodes with refreshingly...
In a departure from her Mrs. Pollifax series (Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled, 2000, etc.), Gilman revisits Madame Karitska, a psychic from a previous novel (The Clairvoyant Countess, not reviewed) whose full name, Countess Marina Elena Provotchnichet Gaylord Von Domm Karitska, reflects her exotic and checkered past. She has set up shop (“Madame Karitska, Readings”) in a seedy Bohemian section of New York City. The people from all walks of life who consult her include Detective Lieutenant Pruden, who reluctantly relies on her clairvoyance and her psychometric ability to perceive something about people from objects they have handled to help him with tough cases. Now Madame Karitska literally brings a case to him: a briefcase full of diamonds that an old acquaintance, pursued by an evil-looking character, tossed to her on a subway. In turn, Pruden asks Madame to “read” a gold cross worn by a young music student killed in an apparent hit-and-run accident. When she picks up the cross, Madame sees an alarming obsession. Another client brings her the ring worn by her husband, passionately committed to the same cultlike organization that claimed the daughter of an old friend and former client. With each case, the stakes grow, but Madam Karitska sails through them all with the calm, compassionate wisdom of a combination social worker, matchmaker, and nemesis.
Madame Karitska is an appealing figure, and Gilman handles the psychic aspects of these episodes with refreshingly down-to-earth practicality, but Kaleidoscope remains an uneven collection of short stories, ranging from the sentimental to the melodramatic.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44820-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t be fooled by the brand-new packaging. If you liked Rosenfelt’s rollicking previous series, you’ll like this one too.
The creator of Paterson attorney Andy Carpenter’s dog-friendly mysteries launches a new series starring several of Andy’s friends and enemies, including the canine client he represented in Dachshund Through the Snow (2019), with a supporting role for Andy himself.
Judge Henry “Hatchet” Henderson, whose courtroom has provided the arena for so many of Andy’s shenanigans, is threatened with blackmail, and he wants the newly formed K Team—retired cop Corey Douglas; his canine partner, Simon Garfunkel; Andy’s fearsome investigator, Marcus Clark; and Andy’s wife, Laurie Collins—to identify and neutralize the threat, which he plans to keep confidential by paying Andy a dollar to take the case as his lawyer. At first the team’s inquiries into which of Henderson’s recent cases (the manslaughter conviction of ex-boxer John Lowry? The freeing of self-confessed embezzler Nina Williams on a legal technicality? The acquittal of Ponzi-scheming broker Drew Lockman?) provoked the blackmail lead nowhere. Then they lead to hints of a financial manipulation conspiracy on a grand scale. By the time they lead to Equi-net, an electronic communications network that handles securities trades for people who’d like to keep them private, five people have been murdered, with more slated to follow. The one place they don’t lead is to continued confidentiality, as Henderson learns to his sorrow. The net of deceptions, double-crosses, and professional assassinations gets pretty knotty, but although the conspiracy involves an awful lot of guilty parties, the gimmick behind all their criminal activity is appealingly simple. Through it all, Corey serves as an investigator and narrator every bit as ebullient as Andy and a lot more diligent. In fact, longtime fans may wonder why Rosenfelt saw the need to create a new series that follows the pattern of Andy’s 20 successful cases so closely. If he thought Paterson needed more wiseacre crime fighters, he was undoubtedly right.
Don’t be fooled by the brand-new packaging. If you liked Rosenfelt’s rollicking previous series, you’ll like this one too.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25719-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A real test for Patterson’s huge audience: If they buy this, they’ll buy anything.
Only a writer of Patterson’s star-wattage could have hoodwinked his publisher into bringing out this unlovely mess, which pits forensic psychologist Alex Cross against two separate serial killers.
It begins with the slaughter of still another of Cross’s professional and romantic partners, FBI agent Betsey Cavalierre, by Cross’s old nemesis, the Mastermind (Roses Are Red, 2000), who instantly phones to taunt his adversary. With still another partner dead, how can Cross go on? But he has to, immediately, because another killer is on the loose—actually, a pair of killers, William and Michael Alexander, teenaged vampires whose murder of two army officers in Golden Gate Park is just a warmup for the carnage to come. As the Mastermind keeps trying to get Cross’s attention by threatening his adorable kids, his grandmother, and everyone else he’s ever known, Patterson, apparently eager to escape the constraints of the low body count in the soapy Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas (p. 694), unleashes the hounds of hell. Under the direction of their dread Sire, the exultant Alexander brothers (“We’re immortal! We’ll never die!”), leave a trail of gory victims in Las Vegas, Savannah, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge before returning to Santa Cruz for a climactic sequence that finally unmasks the ho-hum Sire. The moment the vampire chronicles end, Cross, without missing a beat, turns to that other serial killer, and soon, courtesy of one of his famous profiler’s hunches, has the Mastermind in his sights. Can he hunt down his enemy before the Mastermind exacts a terrible vengeance against somebody else—say, beauteous Jamilla Hughes of San Francisco Homicide—whose death would reduce Cross to babbling despair? The grade-school characterizations of everyone from cops to victims to cackling psychos guarantee that you won’t care a bit.
A real test for Patterson’s huge audience: If they buy this, they’ll buy anything.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-69323-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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