by Iris Johansen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2019
The densely woven backstory, the oracular speeches, the elliptically motivated vendetta, and the constant recourse to...
Think the competition among music students at Juilliard is fierce? Wait till you hear what the family of violinist Anna Svardak has done, and is prepared to do, to anyone they consider a rival.
By the time John Svardak sets his sights on Cara Delaney, he's already murdered four other violinists on both sides of the Atlantic because their music-making can't compare to that of his long-dead violinist sister, Anna. In fact, the chain of vengeance goes back even further, since Cara's grandfather Sergai Kaskov murdered Anna as payback for the time years earlier when Anna's father and brother broke Kaskov's finger bones in the gulag where they were imprisoned together because they feared him as yet another possible competitor in the days when she was still alive. Svardak succeeds in snatching Cara from her concert tour and hiding her out in the wilds of West Virginia as he cackles over the fate she’ll share with her most recent predecessor, violinist Marian Napier. Fortunately, Cara’s guardians, forensic sculptor Eve Duncan and Detective Joe Quinn of the Atlanta Police Department, and Michael, Eve’s preternaturally empathic 10-year-old son, are fully equal to the challenge of locating her before she can follow Niccolò Paganini and Jascha Heifetz into history. So for that matter is Cara herself, who’s so eager to consummate her recently professed love for Eve’s childhood friend Jock Gavin that she’s doubly watchful and resourceful in planning her escape. But restoring Cara to the bosom of her family is only one more chapter in the war declared by Svardak, who’s “crazy, not a ruthless sociopath,” as Joe helpfully observes, and who’s bent on eliminating everyone Cara loves before he returns to sweep her up again, this time for keeps, as a final tribute to his dead sister.
The densely woven backstory, the oracular speeches, the elliptically motivated vendetta, and the constant recourse to near-supernatural powers all suggest that what Johansen (Vendetta, 2018, etc.) is writing is not a fairy tale for adults but a fairy tale with a mostly adult cast.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-07588-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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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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 Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
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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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