Kidnapping, stakeouts and shootouts disrupt the otherwise cozy tone without solving the puzzle or explaining the criminals’...
A body washed up on a beach plunges the English seaside town of Frantham into the midst of a byzantine kidnap conspiracy in this obscurely plotted follow-up to A Reason to Kill (2008).
DI Sebastian “Mac” McGregor is on the road to recovery from the trauma that sidelined him for months: watching a cornered kidnapper slash to death a little girl before he could save her. Even violent Edward Parker’s fatal fall from a cliff hasn’t dented his newfound optimism. Mac keeps tabs on Parker’s son George, who’s been consigned by social services to the Hill House children’s home; he dines at Peverill Lodge with actress-turned-boarding-house-proprietor Rina Martin and her menagerie of retired showbiz folk; he even summons the gumption to flirt with comely medical examiner Miriam Hastings. But when a body washed up in a cove turns out to be not the expected corpse of Parker, but that of 24-year-old Pat Duggan, the pace of Mac’s life accelerates, and not in a good way. Duggan’s father Jimmy reveals that Pat was kidnapped not once but twice, part of a vast string of abductions staged by Travis Haines. This shadowy mastermind also snatched the Goldman twins and the Randall boy, who was returned minus a finger. And George Parker recognizes Haines’ goons, Stan and Coran, as the men he’d seen with his dad shortly before the cliffside plunge. Will Mac intervene in time to save other children from peril?
Kidnapping, stakeouts and shootouts disrupt the otherwise cozy tone without solving the puzzle or explaining the criminals’ motives.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7278-6680-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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