A taut, gripping tale of murder, therapy, and duplicity.
A California psychotherapist faces the exposure of her secrets when her ex-husband and his wife suffer brutal deaths in this thriller.
Dr. Ava Lawson is taken aback by the deaths of Ian and Kate Culpepper, known as the Love Doctors for their short-lived reality TV show. Ava was married to Ian, who left her several years ago for Kate. When Ava’s boyfriend, cop Luke Donovan, asks her when she last saw Ian, she lies. That’s because her most recent contact with Ian involved a memory card with something incriminating. But after the police rule the Culpeppers’ deaths a double homicide, they’re looking at Ava for it, as a dying Ian had apparently written her name in blood. At the same time, an anonymous caller vaguely threatens Ava: “I know what you did.” Ava believes this is karma, in response to something “unforgivable” that she and Ian did. But she won’t sit idly by while someone frames her for the homicides, such as attempting to plant the murder weapon on her. Ava knows a handful of individuals with motives for killing the Culpeppers, and though she’s lying to Luke and others, she isn’t the only one being deceitful. This is the third installment of Kane’s (The Hanging Tree, 2018, etc.) thematically linked Doctors of Darkness series. The volume is just as bleak as that title suggests, as Ava throughout engages in shady, sometimes criminal behavior. But many of the author’s intricately drawn characters are less than savory, which makes for a grim story but also a more likable Ava, because her deeds aren’t as shocking as others’ actions. The tightly written narrative becomes a white-knuckle, ticking clock, as the police investigation zeros in on Ava and she gets closer to a killer. Kane skillfully bounces the plot from present day to intermittent flashbacks, chronicling the pre- and post-years of Ava’s marriage to Ian. Likewise, periodic newspaper articles and exposés keep the public—and readers—updated with details on the ongoing homicide case.
A taut, gripping tale of murder, therapy, and duplicity.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-578-40133-1
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Ellery Kane Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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