Next book

GATEWAYS

Repairman Jack, the adaptation of The Tomb (1984), is now in pre-production—though not with Arnold.

Seventh in the Repairman Jack series (The Haunted Air, 2002, etc.), which keeps expanding its supernatural background while shrinking all into an amoebic typeface.

The series began and supposedly takes place in the mid- to late-’80s, while we have references to 9/11, Homeland Security, and recent songs. Although Jack fights The Otherness, an evil entity, throughout the various installments, he’s guided (blindly) by a benign Anti-Otherness entity, which apparently checks the evil entity’s each bad intent by moving Jack about to repair cracks in humankind. Wilson deepens Jack’s character by having Jack’s pregnant girlfriend Gia beg him to join the human race and stop living between the cracks—Jack has no Social Security number, has never filed a 1040 or paid a cent in taxes, is never photographed or fingerprinted, avoids credit cards, etc. And Gia has inner warnings that The Otherness wants their baby. (Jack, by the way, sounds like Arnold—who fought The Entity in End of Days—and has Schwarzenegger’s brand of humor.) Wilson hairpins away from the Gia problem by having Jack fly off to Florida to attend his comatose dad, who’s been in a car accident outside his seniors’ community, Gateways South. An accident devised by The Otherness? Jack wonders. Meanwhile, in the Everglades, white-headed young Semelee, a girl with a two-headed snapping turtle who belongs to a gang of misshapen beggars, has a talent that senses Jack’s approach by plane. At the hospital he meets Anya Mundy, Dad’s Ruth Gordon–ish neighbor, who tells Jack there’s more to his father than he ever dreamed. Seniors are dying, rather unnaturally, by spider, bird, and snake. As sacrifices? Jack must now learn Dad’s secrets to protect him. What are these weird lights floating up from the Everglades? At last he meets The Otherness, Rasalom, who lets Jack live but promises great future pain.

Repairman Jack, the adaptation of The Tomb (1984), is now in pre-production—though not with Arnold.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-765-30690-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Forge

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003

Next book

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 29


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE A LIST

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 29


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

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

Close Quickview