by Heidi Brod ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 26, 2017
Deftly probes a serial-killer case and the equally puzzling lives of a troubled couple.
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In this debut thriller, a woman still tormented by a brutal attack years ago endures a volatile marriage and the unnerving feeling that someone’s stalking her.
Seraphina Swift’s six-year marriage is crumbling. Though she and her husband, Harper, have a baby girl, Sky, there’s definite hostility between the two. This is partly due to Seraphina’s belief that a shadowy figure is watching and following her. With no actual proof, Harper writes it off as paranoia. She’s further plagued by night terrors, stemming from her rape while at Harvard; she blacked out that night and can remember only pieces of it, including evidently killing her assailant with a broken bottle. Soon after her attack, a body washed ashore in Boston, an unsolved murder Seraphina surmises is connected to her assault. In present day, Harper, an investigator with the district attorney’s office, is working the murder of Brooke Beck, who had apparently been looking into the media-dubbed Renaissance Killer from Boston. Seraphina, meanwhile, thinks Harper’s having an affair and is shocked when he becomes a suspect in another murder. Certain her pursuer is behind it, Seraphina hones her strength and instincts so she can confront her fears—with fists and a gun. Brod’s novel is decidedly gloomy: both Seraphina and Harper are initially unlikable, each blaming the other for their fractured relationship. But details of her assault, as well as two unnerving pasts (involving dubious parents), should earn them readers’ empathy. They’re likewise as gripping as the ongoing investigation: it’s unclear whether Seraphina’s stalker is real or if Harper’s truly capable of murder. This is reflected in Brod’s vivid descriptions, particularly the passages revealing Seraphina’s perspective, which could reflect either despair or delusion: “I triple lock the doors and go through my ritual, closing the shades, locking out the monsters that live mostly in my mind.” Suitably, the largely resolved ending leaves quite a few questions unanswered.
Deftly probes a serial-killer case and the equally puzzling lives of a troubled couple.Pub Date: May 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9176-9
Page Count: 204
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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