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AND THEN YOU DIE...

A well-crafted romance thriller from Johansen (Long After Midnight, 1997, etc.), whose hardcover adventures for women are much more fun than her paperback bodice-rippers. There are monsters in the world, and somebody has to get rid of them. Photographer Bess Grady spends her professional life shooting the results of their carnage with her camera, and CIA superhero Kaldak (one name only, please) shoots the bad guys with his gun (that is, when he's not breaking their necks). The dynamic duo meet in the small Mexican town of Tenajo (``in the back of beyond''), where Bess has gone for a vacation and where Esteban, the villain, has just used a mutant form of anthrax to annihilate everyone in the village—in a sort of beta test for a much larger hit in the US. Bess's sister Emily—a wife, mother, and gifted pediatrician—succumbs to the disease, but Bess herself, it turns out, is immune. In fact, she's the CIA's, the CDC's, not to mention all America's, best hope of developing a vaccine against the deadly infection. Kaldak helps Bess and an infant girl, the only other survivor of the Tenajo tragedy, to escape. (Just in case you don't think Esteban is a stinker, the cute little infant is shot in the side.) Without telling Bess why he's helping her, Kaldak takes her to Atlanta, and then to New Orleans, to lure Esteban into the open. Sharing her apartment with him in the French Quarter, Bess finds that inside the assassin with the harsh face of a gargoyle lies David Gardiner, a tormented ex-doctor with the heart of a pussycat. Johansen continues the trend of creating female leads whose physical strength and personal courage are as well developed as the moral fiber they share with heroines of old. Heroes are crucial, of course. But in Johansen's fiction, the girl tied to the railroad tracks would have a Swiss Army knife at the ready.

Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1998

ISBN: 0-553-10616-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997

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THE A LIST

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

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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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BOOK OF THE DEAD

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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