The latest mystery-thriller for Ike (Rogue, 2011, etc.) provides all the fast-paced action and danger readers have come to...
An eagerly awaited vacation on a quiet Maine island becomes a nightmare for a former CIA agent and his significant other.
Ike Schwartz is currently the sheriff of Picketsville, Va., where his longtime love, university president Ruth Dennis, is recovering from a nasty incident that put her in a coma. Both of them manifestly need some peace. So when Ruth inherits her aunt’s house on Scone Island, they sneak off for some R&R. Four miles off the Maine coast, Scone has no electricity, phone service or even reliable water. But it does have a recent death, the suspicious fall from a cliff of mystery man Harmon Staley. While Ike is looking into the death of Staley, who was once his colleague, another of his old pals from the CIA is desperately seeking him. Charlie Garland, cut out of a secret operation by his boss, has learned that someone is killing CIA agents who once had worked on several cases with Ike, and he's convinced that Ike is next on the list. After snooping around on Scone and a nearby uninhabited island once used by the Coast Guard, Ike thinks he’s found the motive for Staley’s murder. Now he and Ruth may have to fight a pitched battle against unknown enemies from his past to survive.
The latest mystery-thriller for Ike (Rogue, 2011, etc.) provides all the fast-paced action and danger readers have come to expect.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0053-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
Short chapters, paragraphs, and sentences; stilted dialogue; facile plotting; a few feeble passes at description: a...
Schematic and pedestrian, Patterson’s latest (after The Beach House, p. 519) pits Alex Cross against a trio of serial killers.
If only Alex Cross (last seen in Violets Are Blue, 200l) could retire from the Washington Police Force, as he wants to when he first appears here, having breakfast with his family. Alas, Cross’s friend John Sampson entreats the detective to take one more case, and a desultory pursuit ensues. Sampson believes the conviction of his friend, ’Nam vet Ellis Cooper, for the brutal murder of three women resulted from a frame-up. Patterson’s quick (what else?) crosscut to the killers bears Sampson out. Calling themselves “the three blind mice,” the men are hired killers unaware of the identity and motives of their employer, who, presumably, is the fourth mouse of the title. With “the clock for Ellis Cooper . . . ticking so loud,” Cross and Sampson search in vain for evidence to clear him before he is executed. The Army’s indifference to evidence that clears Cooper and points to other suspects bluntly suggests a cover-up. Then, crimes similar to the ones Copper allegedly committed follow: the three killers slaughter their victims, paint them red, and leave a straw doll at the scene of the carnage. E-mails from someone called “Foot Soldier” lead Cross to the solution, which, as Patterson makes obvious, stems from atrocities the military committed in Vietnam. Some feel-good domestic scenes (Cross’s grandma survives heart surgery) and a few hackneyed romantic interludes for Cross and Sampson break up the chase. At the closeout, the killers dispatched, Cross is planning to go to work for the FBI, suggesting a new tack for the series.
Short chapters, paragraphs, and sentences; stilted dialogue; facile plotting; a few feeble passes at description: a Patterson blue-plate special.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-69300-6
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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