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DEATH IS DISPOSABLE

This series kickoff by the author of the Jane Stuart suburban mysteries (Crushing Crystal, 2004, etc.) shows a nice eye for...

A Connecticut socialite finds her vocation running a New York City sanitation garage.

Fresh out of Penn, Anna Winthrop didn’t feel like becoming a doctor or lawyer like her Greenwich sisters or an investment banker like her brother Will. Following her own star, she took the New York City civil-service exam and didn’t balk when the job they offered her involved riding on trucks heaving bags of trash. Now, as Sanitation Supervisor of Manhattan Central District 13, she spends her days making sure Jay and Winston don’t harass co-workers Kelly and Brianna and that well-intentioned Pierre doesn’t back his rig into any other trucks. At home, she gives bottles and cans to Isaiah, the sweet homeless man who hangs around her 43rd Street apartment, annoying first-floor tenant Mrs. Dovner. When Mrs. Dovner sends beat cop Santos Reyes to warn Anna, he realizes that her ministrations to Isaiah aren’t illegal and asks her on a date instead. But even their growing romance isn’t enough to get the police to investigate Isaiah’s eventual murder, so Anna takes on that burden herself, soon discovering a hidden world of homeless folk where looks can be immensely, and tragically, deceiving.

This series kickoff by the author of the Jane Stuart suburban mysteries (Crushing Crystal, 2004, etc.) shows a nice eye for city life, even though Anna’s better at collecting the trash than at connecting the dots.

Pub Date: July 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-7278-6605-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Severn House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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BLOOD TRAIL

More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...

Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.

Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.

More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.

Pub Date: May 20, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008

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