Cops. vs. sicko-psychos in L.A.—in a pulpy melodrama (no mystery) that has a certain creepy appeal in the first half, but then becomes increasingly contrived and belabored. Dour detective Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins of the LAPD is working on two separate cases: a senseless triple-killing during a liquor-store holdup; and the disappearance of unstable cop "Jungle Jack" Herzog. They're connected, of course—as we learn in interspersed chapters about psychiatrist Dr. John ("Night Tripper") Havilland, a super-psycho who uses drugs and mind-control to turn lonely folks (like Herzog) into criminal pawns, with a terminally ill zombie as his primary hit-man. And when Hopkins' sleuthing (some of it implausibly lucky) starts leading to Dr. John, the maniacal mastermind fights back—with more murders, false leads, nasty traps. . . and seduction by one of his pawns, classy hooker Linda. ("The cop/whore entity pushed itself into a wordless, gasping trance.") Some neat cross-plotting, some okay cop-legwork—but, stretched out to nearly 300 pages, this thin invention is over-thick with murky pseudo-psychology, lurid violence (snuff films, etc.), and globules of pretentious/purple prose.
Pub Date: Dec. 18, 1984
ISBN: 1400095298
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1984
If you’re in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd.
Inspector Ian Rutledge’s 22nd case revolves around two young women found dead in utterly unexpected places.
Scheduled to give evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rutledge can’t go to the village of Avebury—where a body has been found stabbed to death in the center of a circle of prehistoric stones—in the place of Chief Inspector Brian Leslie when Rutledge’s nemesis, Chief Superintendent Markham, sends Leslie there when he'd been looking forward to a couple of days off. Instead, Rutledge ends up going to the Shropshire village of Tern Bridge, where a woman eventually identified as Bath schoolmistress Serena Palmer has been stabbed and tossed into a grave dug the day before for someone else. After a witness’s unexpectedly keen eye and sharp memory puts Rutledge on a trail that leads with disconcerting suddenness to Serena Palmer’s killer, he’s sent to Avebury after all, since Leslie’s conscientiously thorough inquiries have identified neither the killer nor the victim. This mystery, Rutledge finds, is just as murky as the Shropshire murder was clear, and he despairs that he’ll ever have anything to add to Leslie’s report. Constantly threatened by Markham, who’s still holding the letter of resignation Rutledge submitted to him after his last case (The Black Ascot, 2019, etc.), and intermittently needled by the ghost of Cpl. Hamish McLeod, the corporal he executed in a trench in 1916 when he refused to lead troops into further fighting in the Somme, Rutledge struggles with a case whose every lead—a necklace of lapis lazuli beads, a trove of letters written to the victim—leads him not so much to enlightenment as to ever deepening sadness. The final twist may not surprise eagle-eyed readers, but it will reveal why Todd’s generic-sounding title is painfully apt.
If you’re in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-290553-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Trenton's most unlikely bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, is looking for Kenny Mancuso, who jumped bail after shooting his onetime friend Moogey Bues in the knee. And she's been hired to do a little work on the side for creepy, marriage-minded undertaker Spiro Stiva, who's missing two dozen empty caskets. But instead of getting on Mancuso's tail, Stephanie (One for the Money, 1994) finds Mancuso on hers—he's sending her body parts excised from Stiva's deceased clients, taunting her in their face-to-face meetings, and going after her irrepressible Grandma Mazur with an ice pick—and by the time she locates the caskets, they're about to be set afire. Meantie, somebody has returned to Moogey Bues's gas station to shoot him dead, and Joe Morelli, the swivel-hipped stallion of Trenton Vice who's always had the hots for Stephanie, has tied both Mancuso and Moogey's equally menacing colleague Perry Sandeman into a big-time theft of government arms. But how can Stephanie ever fit the pieces of the puzzle together when her cockeyed burg puts her hamster under constant threat of death, and her manicurist tells her, "I used to carry a forty-five, but I got bursitis from the weight"? The first must-read of the new year: more action and laughs than two weeks in Trenton.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-19638-7
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
