Nearly as violent as it is explicit—a pulpy thriller boasting a free-love message.
Multifaceted assassin Gideon returns to tangle with his enemies and lovers in Dickey’s highly sexed latest (Sleeping with Strangers, 2007, etc.).
There are worse things for a guy than being stuck in a fancy London hotel room with two beautiful women he hardly knows, but in spite of his Bond-like way with the ladies, contract killer Gideon has much on his mind. Everyone, it seems, wants to bed him or kill him. Sometimes both. Pursued by a broken-nosed rival hitman (Bruno) who followed him from America, he is also preoccupied with Arizona, the gorgeous con artist who broke his heart and might now be after his neck. She offers her help, but can he trust her? And then there is unfinished business with his mother Thelma, the prostitute living in England whose questionable parenting techniques he blames for turning him into the man he is today. Far friendlier is Lola Mack, the curvy wannabe actress he meets on his flight over, who turns to Gideon after her London-dwelling boyfriend spurns her, and the elegant Mrs. Jones, a mystery woman on the run from a bad marriage and family tragedy. Those two join him in his room and the trio exhaustively explores erotic possibilities, with Gideon trying to keep his job secret from his new playmates. Needless to say, it gets more complicated and bloodier, with our hero trying to save his skin, honor his obligations and protect those who suddenly seem to matter most to him. He is eventually forced into a showdown with Bruno that puts him on the trail of the party who placed the hit on him. With stops in Amsterdam and Detroit, Dickey’s latest meanders a bit in the earlier scenes, but it gains momentum as plot points introduced in the previous book come together.
Nearly as violent as it is explicit—a pulpy thriller boasting a free-love message.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-525-95038-7
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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