Questions compel, characters don’t. Give Theo the next case.
After a promising start, Grippando’s eighth thriller—about an insurance scam and the Russian Mafia—stalls at midpoint and never recharges.
Grippando (A King’s Ransom, 2001, etc.) begins as confidently as Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck (last seen in The Pardon, 1994) strides from a courtroom where he has just won a case. Jack’s former girlfriend Jessie Merrill had sold her three million-dollar insurance policy for half that amount to a firm named Viatical Solutions. Jessie had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and given a short time to live. But her doctor later said his diagnosis was wrong, and that healthy Jessie was unlikely to die anytime soon. Viatical sued to retrieve its investment and lost. But after the verdict comes down, Jack suspects that Jessie and her doctor had scammed Viatical with fake records. And he’s right—as Jessie brazenly tells him, her revenge over their break-up now complete. Then someone works revenge on Jessie: she turns up dead in Jack’s bathtub in a pool of blood, wrists slashed. Grippando now works many intriguing angles: Did Jack kill Jessie? Did Jessie kill herself? Why did Jessie deposit her take from the case in an account under her name and Jack’s? Is someone from Viatical the culprit? Jack digs into the latter possibility to save his hide and to shore up his shaky marriage with wife Cindy. Therein begins the drag. Cindy remains in numbing stasis, her conversations with Jack moving in wearying circles. Likewise, Jack’s probe of Viatical keeps meeting itself coming around to the same question: Did someone from this front for the Russian mob kill Jessica? Intriguing, but hardly riveting when pushed uphill by flat characters—save for blunt, funny Theo, Jack’s ex-con friend, who steals the few scenes Grippando gives him.
Questions compel, characters don’t. Give Theo the next case.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621344-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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