Character actions don’t always make sense, but the story carries a marked impression of dread and impending doom.
In Verdeyen’s debut thriller, there’s a hitch to a man’s perfect murder of his wife: he must travel to Indiana to recover jewelry from a mistakenly sold piece of furniture.
Attorney Steven Babcock may have gotten away with murder. He seems to have covered all his bases in the plot to kill his wife, Marian, but he didn’t count on the auction company inadvertently selling his hutch, where he’s stashed some of Marian’s more extravagant jewels. He manages to track the hutch to antique shop owner Bob Hillard in Illinois. Unfortunately, he has to kill Bob to get the pertinent information: Indiana native Jennifer Osbourn, it seems, is the hutch’s newest owner. Steven is on the hunt, but Jennifer and Chicago PI Matt Broadhurst are looking into Bob’s murder. The lawyer’s inquiries to Jennifer about the antique piece make the two suspicious, and it might not be easy for Steven to retrieve the jewelry. Verdeyen’s novel is a subdued but competent thriller. Steven, for one, is a frighteningly meticulous villain. He’s generally impolite but not outright violent, and his plot for Marian’s murder is chillingly cold and depraved. A fair amount of first-person perspective from Steven only solidifies his detailed scheming and unsettling lack of guilt or empathy. His behavior when searching for the jewelry, however, is strange: he doesn’t simply explain the error to Bob or insist that the company, whose auctioneer admitted to the mistake, reclaim the hutch for him. In fact, he becomes increasingly desperate as the story progresses, which adds to the suspense, especially when he assumes that the hutch is in Jennifer’s house. There’s an implied attraction between Jennifer and Matt, but it fortunately never overwhelms the story. The duo form an unlikely but believable investigative team, piecing together recent goings-on like an odd phone call or a shopper at Jennifer’s store asking about a hutch. Still, some of their decisions are confusing: Matt suggests not calling the cops because, he says, the two have neither a name nor a description of Bob’s possible killer, though Steven’s mysterious call and shop visit have given Jennifer both.
Character actions don’t always make sense, but the story carries a marked impression of dread and impending doom.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1499296990
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long...
Soldier-turned-soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher goes after a serial killer in a conventionally but nonetheless deeply satisfying whodunit.
In today's armed services, you lose even when you win—at least if you're a woman who files a sexual harassment complaint. Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke were both successful in their suits, which ended the careers of their alleged harassers. But Callan and Cooke ended up leaving the service themselves, and now they're both dead, murdered by a diabolical perp who keeps leaving behind the same crime scene—the victim's body submerged in a bathtub filled with camouflage paint—and not a single clue to the killer's identity or the cause of death. The FBI hauls in Reacher, who handled both women's complaints as an Army MP, as a prime suspect, then offers to upgrade him to a consulting investigator when their own surveillance gives him an alibi for a third killing. No thanks, says our hero, who's taken an instant dislike to FBI profiler Julia Lamarr, until the Feds' threats against his lawyer girlfriend Jodie Jacob (Tripwire, 1999) bring him into the fold. While Reacher is pretending to study lists of potential victims and suspects and fending off the government-sponsored advances of Quantico's comely Lisa Harper, the murderer is getting ready to pounce on a fourth victim: Lamarr's stepsister Alison. This latest coup does nothing to improve relations between Reacher and the Feebees, all of them determined to prove they're the toughest hombres in the parking lot, but it does set the stage for some honest sleuthing, some treacherous red herrings, and some convincing evidence for Reacher's assertion that all that profiling stuff is just plain common sense.
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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