Boldly drawn characters shoulder mysteries set among elite Washington power brokers.
A photojournalist notices too many odd things for her own good.
Sophie Medina is struggling to deal with the death of her husband, a CIA spy supposedly killed in an accident. Even former Secretary of State Quill Russell, a family friend, won’t reveal much, but he does ask Sophie to shoot photos for a book about his Virginia home as an anniversary gift for his wife, Vicki. On an early morning trip to shoot the last of the photos, she sees Vicki naked in the pool with a man who isn't her husband. Upset, Sophie flees, determined to say nothing. Stopping at her mother’s nearby home, she learns about the handwritten will of her recently deceased grandfather, a famous photographer, which leaves everything but his cameras to a small arts school. When she meets former boyfriend Jack O’Hara, now a Jesuit priest, for a run and dinner, they find an unconscious man lying in an alley; Jack recognizes him as Supreme Court Justice Everett Townsend, and Sophie sees he’s the naked man from Vicki’s pool. The justice is disliked by many and has a reputation as a womanizer. Maybe that’s why his wife, Diana, who Jack says is a living saint, seems all too eager to have him cremated as soon as he’s died. A young formerly homeless man named Javier Aguilera, whom Sophie's been helping to become a photojournalist, tells her he was in the ER when Justice Townsend came in—except it wasn’t Justice Townsend. Javi says it was a homeless man with dementia who was Townsend's doppelgänger and who was known around town as “the Professor.” That information sets Sophie on a frustrating trip to try to prove what she’s come to suspect.
Boldly drawn characters shoulder mysteries set among elite Washington power brokers.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781448308033
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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