Great character-driven crime fiction—readers new to the series won’t be entirely lost, and Pendergast patrons will be...
Preston and Child (White Fire, 2013, etc.) return with another adventure for modern crime fiction’s most esoteric detective, FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast.
Badged by the FBI but given free rein, wealthy as a wizard Wall Street trader, intelligent enough to make Mensa members feel inferior, master of exotic Chongg Ran meditation, Pendergast, “skin as pale as marble, eyes like silver conchas,” shoulders his custom 1911 Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special .45 and sets out to find the killer who deposited his estranged son, Alban, dead on his Manhattan mansion’s doorstep. Alban is autopsied, and an exotic turquoise is found in his stomach. At the American Museum of Natural History, Pendergast consults an expert gemologist—worth reading if buying turquoise—and heads for California’s Salton Sea in search of the Golden Spider Mine, all while giving only passing notice to a museum murder under investigation by his friend Lt. Vincent D’Agosta. So begins Pendergast’s deconstruction of a deadly conspiracy originating with patent medicine and ending with bizarre battles—triflic acid, poison darts and Sumatran buckthorn as weapons—at the museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A Pendergast ancestor, Hezekiah, built the family’s fortune on an elixir that ultimately left users with ALS- or Huntingon’s Disease–like symptoms. Now the villain is spurred by epigenetic changes wrought on users’ descendants by “Hezekiah’s Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative.” Pendergast visits exotic climes for clues, and the authors offer sparkling descriptions—the Salton Fontainebleau is a “fantastical cross between a Chinese temple and an Asbury Park amusement parlor.” Constance Greene and other familiar characters appear, and Pendergast learns a startling truth about Alban, whose warped psyche had once wrought havoc.
Great character-driven crime fiction—readers new to the series won’t be entirely lost, and Pendergast patrons will be thoroughly satisfied.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2589-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A gloriously exciting yarn whose spell will end the moment you turn the last page.
What’s worse than learning that your wife’s been abducted and murdered by a madman? Learning that she hasn’t—in this taut, twisty dose of suspenseful hokum from the gifted chronicler of sleuthing sports-agent Myron Bolitar (Darkest Fear, 2000, etc.).
For all the pain Manhattan pediatrician Dr. David Beck has suffered in the eight years since his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth, his bride of seven months, was torn away from him and later found dead, the case itself was open and shut: She was tortured, branded, and slain by the perp calling himself KillRoy, now doing life on 14 counts of homicide. But the case pops open again with the discovery of two corpses buried near the murder site, along with the baseball bat that was used to incapacitate Beck during the abduction, and with a jolting e-mail Beck’s received from somebody who looks just like Elizabeth. If the message is bogus, how was it faked? And if it’s genuine, why has Elizabeth been hiding for eight years, why has she come back now, and whose body did her father, New York homicide cop Hoyt Parker, identify as hers and bury in her grave? A face-to-face rendezvous that Beck’s mysterious correspondent sets up in Washington Square promises answers—but when it’s time for the meeting, Beck is being hunted by the police for a murder a lot less than eight years old. Aided by celebrity lawyer Hester Crimstein, grateful drug-dealer Tyrese Barton, and his own sister Linda’s lover—that glamorous plus-size model Shauna—Beck goes up against even more improbable foes, from ruthless zillionaire developer Griffin Scope to bare-hands killer Eric Wu, in a quest for answers that’ll have you burning the midnight oil till 3:00
Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33555-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.
Jance offers that rare—and welcome—hybrid: the suspense novel with heart.
Jonathan Southard is one of those unhappy men whose unrequited love affair with life has caused a volatile, long-term, internal simmering. One day the mixture explodes, resulting in a crime that is both horrific and, in a sense at least, foreseeable. He shoots his wife, her dog and their two young children, construing this last as an act of mercy inasmuch as it will spare them an aftermath of humiliation and shame. Having wiped out his San Diego family, he sets off for Tucson and the home of his mother, planning to clean the slate. He’s always hated Abby Tennant, attributing to her voluminous maternal shortcomings, of which she is largely innocent. With less difficulty than Southard expected, the bodies are discovered, clues are put together, identities established and soon enough the manhunt is on, participated in by multiple police forces from several states. Among these are the elite Shadow Wolves, Indians who patrol reservation land near the Mexican border. Enter Dan Pardeey. Half Anglo, half Apache, he has a special connection to the small survivor of another of Southard’s monstrous crimes. Angelina Enos, age four, has remained alive only by virtue of being tiny enough to escape notice. Eerily, this parallels Pardee’s own long-ago experience, and when she reaches out to him he has no choice but to respond. Because he does, his life is irrevocably changed and, in a kind of chain reaction, so are the lives of a variety of other players, one way or another, for good or ill, in Jance’s absorbing cast.
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-123924-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
