Characters shoot their way through an entertaining script right to a conclusion with a hole in it.
Patterson (Kill Alex Cross, 2011, etc.), here with co-writer Karp, moves to the posh confines of the Big Apple’s Upper East Side as he delves into crimes against the tabloid-dwelling rich and famous.
Detective Zach Jordan is all about Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect, the new motto of the NYPD. That's handy when he and his new partner are dispatched to a posh hotel to investigate the death of a studio honcho in town for “Hollywood on the Hudson,” an event designed to steal movie business from Los Angeles. Jordan’s new partner, and old girlfriend, is Kylie MacDonald, now married to a successful show-business producer. One dead film mogul is only the beginning. Next on the hit list is a skirt-chasing married actor dead from two fatal rounds from a prop gun supposedly loaded with blanks. The Tinseltown movers and shakers who have descended on Gotham have become targets for the Chameleon, a frustrated working stiff actor who spends his time among the scenery as an extra. But the Chameleon has a talent for makeup and special effects and a sociopath sycophant girlfriend to assist. Via her producer husband, K-Mac knows everyone who’s anyone, and she can don evening wear and mingle where cops aren’t readily visible. That means she’s on the red carpet when the Chameleon’s next victim, vodka-swilling bad boy Brad Schuck, is torched by a Molotov cocktail lobbed into his Hummer limo. With the publicity-conscious mayor leaning hard on Jordan’s boss, a clone of Lt. Van Buren on Law and Order, there are round-the-clock shifts at the 19th Precinct, leaving little time for Jordan to go one-on-one at Gerri’s Diner with his possible new flame, department shrink Cheryl Robinson. First, he has to team up again with MacDonald to save her husband and second, foil the Chameleon’s plot to send a hundred Hollywood types to never-never land with big chunks of C-4.
Characters shoot their way through an entertaining script right to a conclusion with a hole in it.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-19986-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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