by Iris Johansen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 2012
Johansen throws in enough crooked characters to house an entire prison in a plot that starts out with promise but ends up...
Two protagonists from Johansen’s earlier thrillers go rogue (Close Your Eyes, 2012, etc.).
Sigmund Freud would have had a field day studying Eve Duncan, a perennial leading lady in Johansen’s literary world. The long-suffering forensic sculptor not only comes from a dysfunctional family, she talks to the ghost of her dead daughter and has nightmares about people she doesn’t know. But you can be sure that she’ll be meeting the subjects of her dreams soon in the prolific author’s latest offering, which centers around a murder attempt and the disappearance of Beth Avery from a California mental facility. Beth, it seems, is Sandra Duncan’s oldest daughter, which makes her Eve’s half sister, a complication that’s par for the course in Johansen’s complicated world. Beth’s dad is the son of the politically prominent Avery family, and Sandra was forced to give up her parental rights at Beth’s birth. Beth was hidden in boarding schools until she suffered a mysterious head injury and was institutionalized, and Sandra’s tried to keep tabs on her through a private investigator. After she learns of Beth’s disappearance, Sandra turns to Eve and Atlanta PD detective Joe Quinn for help. They drop everything and head to Santa Barbara, where Eve convinces Dr. Kendra Michaels, a music therapist who possesses heightened senses, to assist them. The two women gain entry into the hospital and enlist the help of Kendra’s friend, a computer hacker so brilliant that the Pentagon used him in some unknown capacity to foil the Chinese. Gaining access to private files, Eve, Joe and a helpful intern who’s been planted in the hospital by his uncle, the PI, discover all sorts of sinister details about Beth’s treatment, the employees at the hospital, the Avery family’s dark past and Drogan, the man who’s been hired to kill Beth. And as Eve gets to know her naïve sister and does her best to protect her, she becomes Drogan’s primary target.
Johansen throws in enough crooked characters to house an entire prison in a plot that starts out with promise but ends up being a snoozer.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-65124-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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 J.A. Jance
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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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