Pendergast is a modern Sherlock Holmes, albeit one preferring absinthe to cocaine. The conclusion of this compelling...
Amid the salt marshes near Exmouth, Massachusetts, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast finds an antique medallion of Morax, a demon. Is there a connection to the deliberate sinking of the cargo ship Pembroke Castle by desperate town folk in 1884?
In Preston and Child’s (Blue Labyrinth, 2014, etc.) latest, renowned sculptor Percival Lake asks the weird and wily Pendergast to find his looted wine collection. Oddly, the thieves left behind a case of the rarest vintage, Chateau Haut-Braquilanges ’04. Intrigued, Pendergast and his ward, Constance, drive to seaside Exmouth, where they meet an incompetent police chief who’s overlooked a skeleton long ago walled up in Lake’s wine cellar. Pendergast discovers the hidden skeleton is linked to a missing suite of flawless rubies, the Pride of Africa. In the "lean winter" of 1883-84, featuring disastrous weather caused by a faraway volcanic eruption, townspeople doused the lighthouse and lured Pembroke Castle, carrying the rubies, aground. The grounding and what followed became an atrocity shadowing Exmouth history. Oenophiles will shudder as the wine theft turns sideshow after a historian tracing the shipwreck and a local attorney are killed. Both have "TYBANE" carved into their corpses. Those new to the series get no back story on Pendergast, not on FBI assignment in this case, or Constance, but the book is entertaining, spiced up with arcane words like "desuetude" and quirky descriptions—a body found with a crab "cowering in the comb-over." Employing Chongg Ran meditation and a Les Baer .45, Pendergast is an appealingly quirky hero, as when he remarks of Moby-Dick, "I, myself, am not fond of animal stories."
Pendergast is a modern Sherlock Holmes, albeit one preferring absinthe to cocaine. The conclusion of this compelling two-prong mystery assures another crime conundrum is sure to wash ashore.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2592-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
The fairy-tale ending calls for some convenient coincidences and changes of heart, but Scottoline’s legion of fans will be...
A Connecticut teacher’s long-sought and hard-fought pregnancy turns into a nightmare when Scottoline (Corrupted, 2015, etc.) unleashes one of her irresistible hooks on her.
Forced to extreme measures because her dreamy husband, Marcus, is sterile, Christine Nilsson has finally gotten pregnant using sperm from anonymous Donor 3319. At the party the staff at Nutmeg Hill Elementary have thrown to celebrate her departure, she gets a look at a serial killer doing his perp walk on TV, and he’s the spitting image of Donor 3319. When the Homestead Bank refuses to confirm or deny the identity of the donor, Christine and Marcus react in dramatically different ways. Marcus is determined to sue Homestead and whomever else is necessary to find out once and for all whether the father of the child he’s awaited so long has killed at least three nurses from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Christine persuades her best friend, Lauren Weingarten, to accompany her to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Zachary Jeffcoat has been incarcerated, to ask him whether he’s Donor 3319. But Zachary is considerably shrewder and more manipulative than Christine, and before she knows it, she’s helping him instead of vice versa, finding him a raffish lawyer, volunteering to work as an unpaid paralegal to help with his defense, and interviewing the latest victim’s neighbors. As usual, the complications aren’t quite up to the level of the startling hook, and Christine needs more than a bit of luck to dig up the information she seeks. Along the way, she finds out a good many other things she definitely wasn’t looking for.
The fairy-tale ending calls for some convenient coincidences and changes of heart, but Scottoline’s legion of fans will be too relieved to object.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-01013-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the...
A sociopath targets a suburban Pennsylvania psychiatrist whose success is only the prelude to a series of nightmarish reversals.
It’s true that Dr. Eric Parrish doesn’t have everything. His wife, Caitlin, is divorcing him and being difficult over the joint custody they’ve arranged for their 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, and his latest private patient, 17-year-old Max Jakubowski, seems much more in need of help than his dying grandmother does. But Eric’s colleagues like and admire him—one of them, medical student Kristine Malin, is clearly in hot pursuit—and so does U.S. News and World Report, which is about to announce that the psych unit Eric heads at Havemeyer General Hospital ranks second in the nation. It all goes south with a suddenness that would be shocking outside the pages of Scottoline. Kristine files harassment charges after Eric rejects her come-on. Max phones Eric to say that his grandmother’s died and then takes a powder. Renée Bevilacqua, a girl Max tutors in math and otherwise worships from afar, gets murdered the morning after Eric follows her home, looking in vain for a lead to Max’s whereabouts. The cops haul Eric in as a person of interest, then invade his office and home looking for evidence when he demands they find Max, whom he considers a suicide risk, but won’t say any more about him. The colleagues who so recently toasted Eric lock him out. And that’s all before Max takes five teenagers hostage and announces that he’s going to kill one every 15 minutes before he blows up the King of Prussia Mall. Who can possibly be pulling so many different strings?
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the wall for a troubled teen as she ever was with Bennie Rosato’s all-female law practice (Betrayed, 2014, etc.).Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01011-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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