by D.W. Buffa ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2001
Building his case more through anecdote and apothegm than through evidence or linear narrative, Buffa produces exactly the...
Portland attorney Joe Antonelli, the hero of two lackluster legal thrillers (The Prosecution, 1999, etc.), comes back for thirds in this case of the murdered judges.
It’s clear why Buffa kicks off with a long story Joe tells about his most celebrated run-in with the late Calvin Jeffries, since even dead and buried, the baleful presiding circuit court judge makes by far the strongest impression of any member of his familiar cast. Back in the present, Buffa takes his time getting down to the business of Judge Jeffries’s fatal stabbing, taking time out first for Joe’s visit to his former associate Elliott Winston, whose wife Jean left him for the judge after he was confined to a mental hospital. The Portland cops, meantime, have been a lot less dilatory. Acting on an anonymous tip, they’ve arrested homeless ex–psychiatric patient Jacob Whittaker for the killing, and he’s obligingly confessed, given them information only the murderer could have known, and committed suicide an hour after the arrest. It’s all open and shut—until the day two months later when Judge Quincy Griswald, Jeffries’s replacement on the circuit bench, is stabbed to death under eerily similar circumstances, and the cops follow another anonymous tip to the same spot to arrest another homeless man with a bloodstained knife. This time, though, Joe—taking time out from the second-chance romance that’s just fallen onto his lap—takes over the case of the second defendant, even though it looks more and more to him as if the real killer must be a man who’s had an unbreakable alibi for the past 12 years. In the absence of ingenuity, Joe’s only tool is bulldog tenacity. Will it be enough to win?
Building his case more through anecdote and apothegm than through evidence or linear narrative, Buffa produces exactly the ending savvy readers will have seen coming all along.Pub Date: May 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52737-8
Page Count: 418
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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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New York Times Bestseller
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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