Too bad rumpled Michael Moore doesn’t act: he’d be a true-hearted Jack striking at Christopher Plummer purring as top...
Eighth in Wilson’s Repairman Jack series (Gateways, 2003, etc.) about his vigilante outcast facing the Otherness, a demonic force much like Lovecraft’s indefinably mysterious Cthulhu.
Fans who prefer Wilson’s medical thrillers, like Sims (2003), will nonetheless find delight here, as Wilson and Jack take on a Scientology organization clone. Although Repairman Jack—a man who’s never been photographed or fingerprinted, has no identifying social security card, credit card, or insurance, and pays no taxes—is led about by the Ally, an Anti-Otherness entity or force, Jack’s jobs usually take place repairing cracks in humankind that appear to be less than mystical. Here, he has two human jobs that eventually crisscross each other on an occult level. And he has a pregnant girlfriend, Gia DiLauro, who has a snappy nine-year-old daughter, Vicky. Jack’s first job is to rescue Johnny Roselli, the absent son of aged millionaire Maria Roselli, from the multibillion-dollar Dormentalist Church (read: Scientology), which buys up property all over the planet and has sucked Johnny and his wealth into its innards. Cooper Blascoe, the church’s founder, is presently in suspended animation (read: dead?), and the church is being run by Luther Brady. Hints of the Ally at work, through women with dogs, arise while the Dormentalists (who worship The Presence and work toward Opus Omega) promise to awaken “the Other you” (read: the Otherness in you). Jack’s second job is to save a nun being blackmailed by slimy Richie Cordova, whose cover is his p.i. agency. Jack fails his lie-detector test as a prospective Dormentalist, but his fake i.d. as a Swiss with $200 million lands him acceptance by oily Luther Brady himself. Jack teams with investigative reporter Jamie Grant, who hopes to expose the cult but finds herself sinking into occult horror. Will the Otherness join with the Ally when Opus Omega is finished?
Too bad rumpled Michael Moore doesn’t act: he’d be a true-hearted Jack striking at Christopher Plummer purring as top Dormentalist Brady.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30691-3
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.
Three siblings who have been out of touch for more than 20 years grapple with their unsettling childhoods, but when the youngest inherits the family home, all are drawn back together.
At the age of 25, Libby Jones learns she has inherited a large London house that was held in a trust left to her by her birthparents. When she visits the lawyer, she is shocked to find out that she was put up for adoption when she was 10 months old after her parents died in the house in an apparent suicide pact with an unidentified man and that she has an older brother and sister who were teenagers at the time of their parents' deaths and haven't been seen since. Meanwhile, in alternating narratives, we're introduced to Libby's sister, Lucy Lamb, who's on the verge of homelessness with her two children in the south of France, and her brother, Henry Lamb, who's attempting to recall the last few disturbing years with his parents during which they lost their wealth and were manipulated into letting friends move into their home. These friends included the controlling but charismatic David Thomsen, who moved his own wife and two children into the rooms upstairs. Henry also remembers his painful adolescent confusion as he became wildly infatuated with Phineas, David’s teenage son. Meanwhile, Libby connects with Miller Roe, the journalist who covered the story about her family, and the pair work together to find her brother and sister, determine what happened when she was an infant, and uncover who has recently been staying in the vacant house waiting for Libby to return. As Jewell (Watching You, 2018, etc.) moves back and forth from the past to the present, the narratives move swiftly toward convergence in her signature style, yet with the exception of Lucy’s story, little suspense is built up and the twists can’t quite make up for the lack of deep characters and emotionally weighty moments.
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9010-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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