Certainly not the worst of Patterson’s clueless mysteries, but still another likely candidate to be filmed as “a big, dopey...
Superstar psychologist Alex Cross’s quality time with his kids is interrupted by…another serial killer!
The clever, remorseless miscreant who calls himself the Storyteller has already practiced his lethal skills on three hapless New Yorkers before he begins his career in earnest with a series of killings in L.A. Choosing as his victims women who’ve neglected their children for successful careers in the entertainment industry, he describes the murders in overheated e-mails he addresses to his victims but sends to hapless entertainment columnist Arnold Griner, signing them “Mary Smith.” All right, then, is Mary a woman or a man? The LAPD is baffled, the FBI too, so they yank Alex out of Disneyland, where he’s gone to recuperate from his last megadose of murder (The Big Bad Wolf, 2003) and bond with his family while doing his best to duck the attention of a true-crime writer who behaves more like a stalker. Learning that Alex is back on the job despite all his promises, his distraught ex, Christine Johnson, grabs their baby, Little Alex, and stashes him in Seattle, insisting that Big Alex’s devotion to his dangerous job is constantly putting an intolerable strain on his loved ones, a charge that has the merit of being demonstrably true. The irony of it all is that Alex’s reluctant consultation doesn’t slow the Storyteller down a bit. He (or she), undeterred by the superdad angst that substitutes for detection here, just keeps up the torrid homicide rate until fulfilling her (or his) murderous plan. Luckily, the resulting break from falling bodies lasts just long enough for the cops to commit one last, fatal blunder before Alex gets one of the unmotivated brainwaves that makes him “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”
Certainly not the worst of Patterson’s clueless mysteries, but still another likely candidate to be filmed as “a big, dopey thriller based on a dopey bestseller.”Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-15976-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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
A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.
Now that he’s revisited and deepened the tissue of double-crosses that put him on the map with George Smiley, le Carré (A Legacy of Spies, 2017, etc.), evergreen at 87, turns to an equally hapless new hero in the age of Trump and Brexit.
“I’m a field man,” says Nat, a Secret Intelligence Service agent, “not a desk jockey, not a social carer.” Convinced at 47 that his years running spies throughout Europe are over, he accepts one last assignment as the only alternative to being put out to pasture for good: assuming command of Haven, the London substation he describes to his unenthusiastic wife, human rights lawyer Prudence, as “a Mickey Mouse outfit” where his job will be “either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard.” No sooner has Nat sunk into this forgettable ambit than three disquieting developments arise. Florence, a probationer who’s his nominal second-in-command, angrily quits over the unexplained cancellation of a project she’s designed, spearheaded, and pitched to the powers that be. Sergei Kusnetsev, a Russian defector who’s become a sleeper agent for Her Majesty’s Government, is contacted by Anastasia, a Russian agent who presumably either wants to put him to work, if she trusts him, or to expose him, if she doesn’t. And Ed Shannon, the much-younger researcher who joined Nat’s athletic club in order to play badminton with him and vent about the folly of Brexit and the rise of neo-Nazism in the States, suddenly appears in an alarming new role. Seeing the world as he knows it—not the new world order or the special relationship, but his own faded patch of it—threatened from every corner, Nat, determined to assert himself one last time, hatches a rickety plan to keep the pot from boiling over.
A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7887-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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