Does Norman Ralph Delchard want a cozier role in Marston’s 11th-century series? Aging and complaining about a seventh investigation (The Stallions of Woodstock, 1999, etc.) that seems to involve only bickering between two unequal estates on the Welsh border, Ralph sets forth. But Chester’s churchmen are overwhelmed by escalating military necessities even before William the Conqueror’s investigative team arrives. Balanced by Canon Hubert and lawyer Gervase Bret, ex-soldier Ralph allies himself with the crude despot “Hugh the Gross.” Meantime, Hugh’s adversary, the Earl of Chester, sitting astride his horse in Delamere Forest, watches as mysterious arrows drop his personal hawk and rarest huntsman. Ralph quickly determines that Hugh’s merciless, capricious revenge on Saxon poachers is misdirected. But can the crafty Welsh really be massing an army against the brute strength of Hugh, who holds their Gruffydd ap Cygnan as a princely guarantor of peace? Might a woman actually have shot those arrows? And why is the ebullient but smelly Welsh Archdeacon Idwal on the scene? Doves of peace have no effect against the hawks of war here'but craft does, until Ralph, left behind when Hugh marches off, pulls off a last reversal. Marston redeems early workmanlike prose and missed chances for drama by vivid grotesques (the lumbering Hugh, a dwarfish food-taster, the sheepskin-clad Idwal) and an exciting, fast-paced windup. Too fast. Readers tempted by a complex moral situation and rooting for the underdogs will be shot down like Hugh’s hawk.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20948-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.
The 18th installment in the Pendergast series by Preston and Child (City of Endless Night, 2018, etc.) gives the hero a partner in the hunt for a strange killer.
A woman walks a dog in a Miami Beach cemetery, and her dog finds a human heart. Soon more hearts turn up at the gravesites of women thought to have committed suicide a decade before. The FBI assigns agents Pendergast and Coldmoon to work with the Miami PD on the case. Pendergast is highly successful in closing cases on his own but “was about as rogue as they came,” and suspects tend not to survive his investigations. Agent Coldmoon’s secret assignment is to keep a close eye on his partner, “a bomb waiting to go off,” who tends to do something “out of left field, or of questionable ethics, or even specifically against orders.” The current victims are women whose throats have been slit and breastbones split open to remove their hearts, all in quick and expert fashion. The killer leaves notes at the graves, signed “Mister Brokenhearts.” This kind of weirdness is in Pendergast’s wheelhouse, as he’s an odd sort himself, quite outside the FBI culture. Rather like Sherlock Holmes, he sees patterns that others miss. He’s tall, gaunt, dresses like an undertaker, and always seems to have more money than the average FBI agent. Both men are great characters—Coldmoon curses in Lakota and prefers “tarry black” coffee that Pendergast likens to “poison sumac” and “battery acid.” They wonder about the earlier deaths and whether the women had really hanged themselves. For answers they require exhumations, new autopsies, and a medical examiner’s close examinations of the hyoid bones. Meanwhile the deeply troubled killer ponders his next action, which he hopes will one day wipe away his pain and guilt and bring atonement. Alligators, bullets, and a sinkhole contribute to a nerve-wracking finish.
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4720-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Hoag continues to exploit the theme of mutilated women (A Thin Dark Line, 1997, etc.) in a romance thriller about the hunt for a serial killer. Someone in Minneapolis is tying down women, then raping, torturing, and killing them. While they’re still alive, the attacker sticks knives into the soles of their feet, then cuts off their nipples and aureoles. After they die, he stabs them in a ritual pattern, slices off their tattoos, and burns their bodies beyond recognition; to relive his moments of triumph, he audiotapes their screams for mercy and death. He’s the “Cremator”: just another “sadistic sexual serial killer” with low self-esteem and an abused childhood behind him. His first two victims are prostitutes, but when he turns his hand to Jillian Bondurant, the daughter of a billionaire, Minnesota calls in FBI agent John Quinn, world-famous expert on serial killers and related ilk. In the Twin Cities, Quinn is reunited with his ex-lover Kate Conlan, a former FBI expert in violent crime and the only woman he could ever really love. After the death of her daughter and a bitter divorce, Kate has moved to Minnesota and become a victim- and witness- advocate. In that capacity, she’s assigned to watch over Angie DiMarco, a runaway teenager who spied the Cremator while she was turning a trick in the park. As lots of tawdry details are dug up about Jillian (incest, etc.), the killer tortures and murders another woman, kills a small dog (in romance, always a sign of irredeemable evil), then begins to plot against Kate herself. Hoag’s strong dose of S&M resolves in fire, blood, stabbings, and Kate spread-eagled on a table. Though Hoag grows more and more adept at juggling a complex plot, her sort of violent entertainment isn—t for everyone.
Pub Date: March 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10633-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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