by Faye Kellerman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 2015
Move this one to the top of your list if you still pine for linear algebra. The unenlightened may want to wait and see...
Detective Peter Decker welcomes his insufferable former colleague Tyler McAdams, shot at the end of Murder 101 (2014), back to the Greenbury, New York, police force with open arms and violent death.
McAdams, who’s supposed to be studying for his exams at Harvard Law School, says he wants to stay with Decker and his wife, Rina, for peace and quiet and a chance to hit the books without distractions. Distractions promptly arise when Kneed Loft College senior Eli Wolf is found shot to death, his clothes piled neatly next to him, in a snowy field. A car accident six years ago that killed the friend who was driving and broke his brother Jacob’s leg scrambled Eli’s brain. Born into a Mennonite family whose rapport with each other is laconic even when they’re most demonstrative, he’s been drifting further into the world of theoretical mathematics and away from everything else. Now that Decker must question Jacob, Eli’s closemouthed parents, and his even more socially challenged mentors and friends at Kneed Loft, McAdams is eager to get in on the action—if that’s what you want to call the brightly didactic passages explaining Fourier transforms and stochastic oscillators that take the place of Rina Decker’s customary disquisitions on Jewish rituals. Fueled by the discovery of some incomprehensible papers Eli hid in his dorm room, Decker and McAdams talk to the boy's sort-of friend Mallon Euler, who turns out to have quite a crush on McAdams; Dr. Theo Rosser, Eli’s megalomaniac adviser; and paranoid Dr. Katrina Belfort, who lacks the tenure that would presumably suck her last remaining humanity from her. The discovery of a second corpse sharpens the urgency of their inquiries but does nothing to focus them, until eventually one of their several theories of the case, no more or less interesting than the others, hits home.
Move this one to the top of your list if you still pine for linear algebra. The unenlightened may want to wait and see what’s on offer next term.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-227021-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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