Born (Burn Zone, 2008, etc.) pitches this one at readers who like law enforcement infighting better than detection and who...
A sheriff’s deputy in Palm Beach County fights for the respect due his unit and their canine colleagues as they go after the creep who’s been kidnapping and assaulting local teenagers.
Tim Hallett was bounced from the detective squad to the Canine Assist Team after punching out child molester Arnold Ludner in a desperate attempt to make him reveal where he’d left his latest victim. Detective John Fusco, who kicked Hallett to the curb, has never let him forget it, and Hallett’s face still burns every time the two run into each other. But now Hallett’s redemption may be at hand thanks to Junior, the lowlife who’s snatched three girls from the street and molested them. The only clue, a face-mopping rag Junior left behind when the sheriff’s department, with special help from the CAT, rescued Katie Ziegler from his clutches, is useless to the human members of the department. But Rocky, the Belgian Malinois who’s Hallett’s partner, may just be able to trace the rag to its owner—though it remains to be seen whether that owner is actually Arnold Ludner, as Hallett would dearly love to believe. While single dad Hallett is pursued by crime-scene tech Lori Tate, his CAT counterparts Darren Mori and Claire Perkins also flirt with new partners, and for a while it seems as if the entire team will find romance. Don’t be fooled. However banged up they get, Rocky, Brutus and Smarty emerge from the fray in a lot better shape than their humans, who clearly seem bound for a series.
Born (Burn Zone, 2008, etc.) pitches this one at readers who like law enforcement infighting better than detection and who love dogs most of all.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7847-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Catchy title; too bad the psychothriller behind it—despite the publisher's big push—is a mostly routine tale of cop vs. serial-killer. And it's really too bad for Patterson (The Midnight Club, 1988, etc.) that William Diehl's new thriller, Primal Fear (reviewed above), covers some of the same territory with superior energy and skill. A few charms lift this above run-of-the-mill: Patterson's hero, D.C. psychologist/cop Alex Cross, is black, while his lover, Secret Service honcho Jezzie Flanagan, is white; and the narrative moves briskly by cutting between Cross's ambling account and a sharper third-person tracking, mostly of the killer's movements. He is Gary Soneji—a nobody living a deceptively quiet life as Gary "Murphy"—who has killed 200 people and now wants to commit the Crime of the Century and become Somebody: Soneji/Murphy snatches the daughter of a top actress and the son of the US secretary of the treasury. Enter Cross and Flanagan, whose bad luck at finding kids and kidnapper—who, taunting the cops, kills an FBI agent and gets away with a $10-million payoff, while one of the kids turns up dead—changes only when Soneji/Murphy, cracking up, holds hostage to a McDonald's and is wounded by a cop. Here, Patterson's tale begins to mirror Diehl's: Soneji/Murphy turns out to suffer from the same sensational psychosis as Diehl's villain; and in the ensuing trial, Soneji/Murphy's lawyer pursues a defense similar to that of Diehl's attorney-hero. But where Diehl's villain roars on the page, Soneji/Murphy barely smirks; and while Diehl's courtroom crackles with intelligence, Patterson's is almost transcript-dull. Patterson does wind up, however, with a fine noir twist. Cross is a likable hero, but with a watery plot and weak villain—Hannibal Lecter would eat Soneji for breakfast—he doesn't have much to work with here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-69364-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
BOOK TO SCREEN
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