A rigorously written and rousing murder mystery fueled by aggressive plotting and stocked with effervescent youth.
A teenager’s disappearance in an airport sets off a dramatic chain of events surrounding an escaped killer and some hard-won truths about love and possession—and how both can have disastrous consequences.
Forensic psychologist Kane (Legacy, 2016, etc.) parlays her knowledge of and experience with criminal behavior and trauma victims into this novel marking the first in the Doctors of Darkness series. The story features recent high school graduate Samantha “Sam” Bronwyn and her plucky best friend, Ginny Dalton, who travel to San Francisco for a post-school romp against her mother’s wishes. The girls’ dream escape vacation falls apart quickly when Ginny, wearing Sam’s basketball tournament jacket, seemingly vanishes from an airport bathroom without a trace, save for her cellphone. It displays a short message somehow involving Sam’s mother’s name, Clare. Befriending handsome fellow passenger Levi Beckett somehow softens Sam’s anxiety about her missing friend, though an escaped murderer from San Quentin named Cutthroat Cullen wanders the Bay Area undetected and frightens everyone citywide. Cryptic phone messages, a possible mistaken identity, and the determination that Sam was actually the abductor’s intended target are developmental plot points all smartly set against a moody, treacherous, foggy San Francisco backdrop. Adding romance to intrigue is Sam’s smoldering attraction to Levi and his “leather and soap”–scented swagger. As Cullen continues his murder spree across the city in the present day, Kane masterfully weaves in flashback chapters that fill in the killer’s homicidal history with a prison psychologist, who she really is, and how she became ensnared in his deadly head games. As both narratives run parallel to each other and the puzzle pieces begin to fall into place, the author tosses in a few surprises—just enough to keep readers on their toes and the guessing game between Sam and Levi tightly drawn. Because the book is fast-paced and gripping, careful attention is required to absorb the tale’s abundance of crucial details. Though the action is consistently busy, everything ends up gelling nicely in the compelling novel’s final third when the search for Ginny intensifies and the clock ticks down toward a final showdown. This feverishly drawn thriller places Kane’s clever control of crime fiction and knack for memorable characters on full display.
A rigorously written and rousing murder mystery fueled by aggressive plotting and stocked with effervescent youth.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-88096-8
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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