There are surprises aplenty, but this time the ambitious scope—the anatomy of suburban vice—works against suspense; there...
How much do you trust your children, and what would you do if your efforts to keep tabs on them pushed them even further away?
Adam Baye is a good kid, but ever since he gave up hockey, the sport that seemed destined to finance his college education, his parents, a New Jersey transplant surgeon and a Manhattan lawyer, have been worried. So Mike and Tia install spyware on their son’s computer. Once they can follow his every keystroke, visit every site he has logged onto and read every e-mail he has sent and received, they quickly realize that Adam is keeping dangerous secrets from them—so dangerous, in fact, that when he goes AWOL one night and refuses to answer his cell phone, Mike snoops further, using a GPS tracking service to follow Adam to Club Jaguar, way on the other side of the tracks. For his pains, Mike gets beaten up, then pulled in by the FBI, who tell him that the club, which ostensibly provides a haven where teens can safely act out, is a cover for some major felonies. What do the Bayes’ problems have to do with the thoughtless remark with which schoolteacher Joe Lewiston ruined the life of Adam’s sister Jill’s best friend, Yasmin Novak? Or the revelation that desperately ill Lucas Loriman’s father can’t donate a kidney to his son because he’s not the boy’s father? Or the murdered Jane Doe whom Essex County Chief Investigator Loren Muse (The Woods, 2007, etc.) is trying to identify?
There are surprises aplenty, but this time the ambitious scope—the anatomy of suburban vice—works against suspense; there are just too many cutaways to other embattled characters you want to root for but can’t remember why.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-525-95060-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
If you do manage to stick with this crowd until the end, you may at least be surprised by a few late-breaking twists and...
Two trophy wives in Savannah, Georgia, learn that wealth and status can’t protect them when their secrets and lies catch up to them.
Marcie thinks she has finally escaped her bleak past in Idaho. She broke up Jason Maddox’s first marriage and is now Mrs. Maddox, with all the trappings of mansions, country clubs, and the right social set. But when Jason’s 65-year-old boss, William Radford IV, a recent widower—having buried the saintly and never-forgotten Eleanor—returns from London with 22-year-old Keisha, a stunning bride, Marcie’s status as the alpha wife seems uncertain. And is Jason flirting with Keisha? As the novel unfolds, alternating between each woman's perspective, we learn that the husbands may not be the prizes they seem, either. (Though did they ever seem like prizes?) And everyone in Savannah, it seems, has secrets, some more dangerous than others. The author’s ability to build suspense is hampered by overwriting (“Splinters of her heart broke off and she wanted to stab him with them”) and tedious passages; editing would have made the book tighter and moved the plot along better. It’s also a struggle to spend so much time with, or care much about, characters a police officer deems “such truly atrocious people.”
If you do manage to stick with this crowd until the end, you may at least be surprised by a few late-breaking twists and turns.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-285682-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.
Nazi hunters team up with a former bomber pilot to bring a killer known as the Huntress to justice.
In postwar Europe, Ian, a British war correspondent with a vendetta, and his American sidekick, Tony, have set up a shoestring operation to catch the war criminals who seem to be not just slipping, but swarming through the cracks. The same set of circumstances that led Ian to enter a marriage of convenience with Nina, a Siberian former bomber pilot, has also given both common cause: to chase down Lorelei Vogt, a Nazi known as the Huntress, who, by her lakeside lair in Poland, trapped and killed refugees, many of them children. Lorelei’s mother, blandished by Tony, reveals that her daughter immigrated to Boston. Meanwhile, Jordan, an aspiring photographer living in Boston with her widowed antiques-dealer father, Dan, welcomes a new stepmother, Austrian refugee Anneliese, and her 4-year-old daughter, Ruth. Jordan soon grows suspicious of Dan’s new bride: A candid shot captures Anneliese’s furtive “cruel” glance—and there’s that swastika charm hidden in her wedding bouquet. However, Anneliese manages to quell Jordan’s suspicions by confessing part of the truth: that Ruth is not really her daughter but a war orphan. That Jordan’s suspicions are so easily allayed strains credulity, especially since the reader is almost immediately aware that Anneliese is the Huntress in disguise. The suspense lies in how long it’s going to take Ian and company to track her down and what the impact will be on Jordan and Ruth when they do. Well-researched and vivid segments are interspersed detailing Nina’s backstory as one of Russia’s sizable force of female combat pilots (dubbed The Night Witches by the Germans), establishing her as a fierce yet vulnerable antecedent to Lisbeth Salander. Quinn’s language is evocative of the period, and her characters are good literary company.
With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274037-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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