What price motherhood? That's the question George ponders in the sixth (For the Sake of Elena, 1992, etc.) of her multipeopled, slow-paced endeavors. Here, Simon Allcourt St. James and his chronically miscarrying wife Deborah are looking forward to a respite from the adoption question with a visit to Winslough and its vicar, Robin Sage—but Sage is dead, an apparent accident caused when aloof, mysterious herbalist Juliet Spence mistook water hemlock for wild parsnip and served it for dinner. Not bloody likely, thinks Simon, and calls in aristocratic Tommy Lynley of New Scotland Yard. Lynley not only reopens the case but takes local constable, Colin Shepherd, Juliet's lover, to task for mishandling it from the start. Was Juliet only trying to protect her 13-year- old daughter, Maggie, from Sage's inappropriate advances? Did Sage know the identity of Maggie's father, a shadowy figure Juliet has refused to talk about? Sage himself had a few secrets, including an infant son who was a cot-death fatality and a wife who leapt off a ferry and was eventually declared dead. As St. James, Lynley, and feisty Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers track Sage's last days, the constable searches for a scapegoat. The facts, however, inexorably lead back to his own lover—and the depths a mother will go to in order to deal with the loss of her child. A lesser George—with polarized characters too often engaged in lengthy, numbing speechifying (though young Maggie's school chums are a lively bunch) and with Lynley and Havers bypassed for most of the book (a likely disappointment for their fans). Still, fewer than usual over-the-top descriptive passages are a welcome relief.
Pub Date: June 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-553-09253-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s hard to think of any writer since Flannery O’Connor, referenced at several key moments here, who’s succeeded as...
Slaughter’s latest break from the punishing travails of Dr. Sara Linton and Will Trent (The Kept Woman, 2016, etc.) uses a school shooting to reunite two sisters who’ve had compelling reasons for avoiding each other in the years since their own childhood horrors.
Twenty-eight years ago, two masked men broke into attorney Rusty Quinn’s Georgia home looking for the man of the house, the kind of lawyer who gives lawyers a bad name. In Rusty’s absence, things went south instantly, leaving Gamma Quinn dead, her daughter Samantha shot in the head and buried alive, and her daughter Charlotte fleeing in terror. Sam somehow survived and rose above her brain damage to become a successful New York patent attorney; Charlie remained in Pikeville, joined the criminal defense bar, and married ADA Ben Bernard. But she and Ben have separated; she’s taken solace in some quick sex with a stranger in a parking lot; and when she goes to the middle school where her one-night stand works as a history teacher to pick up the cellphone she left behind, she walks into the middle of a shooting that brings back all her own trauma. Goth girl Kelly Wilson admits she shot and killed Douglas Pinkman, the school principal, and 8-year-old Lucy Alexander, but Rusty, whose inbox is already overflowing with hate mail provoked by all the lowlifes he’s defended, is determined to serve as her attorney, with Sam as a most unlikely second chair. In addition to the multilayered conflicts among the Quinns and everyone else in town, Sam, who urged her sister to flee their childhood nightmare, and Charlie, who’s had to live with fleeing ever since, will have to deal with memories that make it hard for them to sit in the same room.
It’s hard to think of any writer since Flannery O’Connor, referenced at several key moments here, who’s succeeded as consistently as Slaughter at using horrific violence to evoke pity and terror. Whether she’s extending her franchise or creating stand-alones like this, she really does make your hair stand on end.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243024-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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