by Douglas Light ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
This sinuous narrative works neatly, both as a gripping novel and a solid meditation on identity.
A young man who survived a tragic accident becomes part of a mysterious international operation where violence and subterfuge abound.
The narrator of this tautly plotted novel doesn’t reveal his name, but he travels through a world in which names, aliases, and hidden identities all have tremendous power. Initially, the structure of the book seems fragmented, but slowly different threads coalesce, revealing a globe-trotting narrative in which betrayals, mysteries, and revelations are interwoven. After the death of his family, the narrator abandons his plans for college and instead opts to be adrift in the world, which eventually leads him to a homeless shelter in Seattle, where he comes into the orbit of a mysterious man named Ray-Ray. From there, he embarks on a career doing a series of nebulous deliveries and drop-offs, which become increasingly global in scope even as the level of danger for these missions increases. That a copy of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock plays a major role in the plot—along with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—suggests that Light (Blood Stories, 2015, etc.) is quite aware of his literary forebears. That counts for a lot, as does the way the various plot threads converge organically. The way the novel encompasses both a grittily realistic tale of coming of age in the Midwest and a globe-trotting espionage thriller is occasionally jarring, but the invocation of unexpected real-world events—a reference to 1998’s Operation Desert Fox factors into one character’s history—helps create a narrative equilibrium. And when one character opines that the nominally fast-paced life he lives “used to be thrilling. Now, it’s tedious,” it’s a fine way of finding balance between the two.
This sinuous narrative works neatly, both as a gripping novel and a solid meditation on identity.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945572-66-1
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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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