Solid thriller, intriguing setting: Johansen’s back on track.
Eve Duncan (Body of Lies, etc.), forensic sculptor, on the trail of an international serial killer this time.
Mark Trevor, one of Scotland Yard’s finest, contacts Eve and her true love, Atlanta police detective Joe Quinn. Why? Someone is meticulously ripping the faces off living women and then killing them. Trevor warns Eve that her foster daughter, 17-year-old Jane MacGuire, could be next. But why? Eve discovers the answer when she reconstructs the facial features of a recent victim’s skull—and finds that the dead woman is a dead-ringer for Jane. After a briefing on the strange ritual killings—volcanic ash was found near each mutilated body—Eve, Jane, and Joe (and sexy Trevor, of course) head to Italy and an archeological dig in Herculaneum. Seems that a former worker on the site, Guido Manza, was obsessed (to the point of neglecting Aldo, his mentally unstable son) with Cira, a beautiful courtesan of ancient Herculaneum whose ravishing likeness was preserved on a villa wall. She still has the power to drive men mad after thousands of years. Guido found and hid the box of gold that Cira’s noble lover gave her, but the explosion he rigged to cover his misdeeds killed him. Somewhere along the line, Aldo became a full-blown psychotic, working out rage over his childhood mistreatment by finding—and killing—modern women who look like Cira. Will Trevor keep his hands off nubile Jane? Yes . . . for now. (A sequel is in the works.) Will Eve step back and let Jane into the spotlight? Yes. Plagued by dreams of Cira’s death in the long-ago volcanic explosion that buried Herculaneum and Pompeii, Jane seems to be conveniently psychic, a favorite plot device of this megaselling author. Nonetheless, Johansen breathes new life into tired themes by bringing supporting characters front and center, and the preposterous storylines and lazy writing of her last titles (Firestorm, 2003, etc.) are nowhere to be seen.
Solid thriller, intriguing setting: Johansen’s back on track.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80341-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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