Stephanie’s appeal has always been synthetic, but this entry leans a mite too much on the tactics of Hollywood summer...
Evanovich once more winds up Trenton’s preeminent bounty hunter and sends her into battle against a most unexpected adversary.
For 12 volumes now (Twelve Sharp, 2006, etc.), Stephanie Plum has been happily divorced from her husband, skirt-chasing lawyer Dickie Orr. So why is it that hours after she’s dropped by the offices of Petiak, Smullen, Gorvich and Orr to plant a bug on him for her private-eye buddy Ranger—a visit that ends in a predictable shouting match with her ex—Dickie has the gall to disappear, leaving behind only a smear of blood and a big empty space at the brokerage firm that had been holding $40 million of the firm’s money? Despite assurances from her sometime lover, Trenton plainclothes cop Joe Morelli, that she has nothing to worry about, Marty Gobel, the officer who’s caught the case, guilelessly informs her that she’s the only suspect. Worse, Joyce Barnhardt, the hussy Dickie had an eye on long ago, is now back in the picture determined to defend her man’s name, even if that means attacking Stephanie bodily. About the only relief from serious threats of violence, in fact, is bail-jumping taxidermist Carl Coglin, who keeps brightening his pursuer’s days with booby-trapped squirrels and beavers.
Stephanie’s appeal has always been synthetic, but this entry leans a mite too much on the tactics of Hollywood summer blockbusters: fires, explosions, stun-gunnings and crude language. Below average for this ebullient series.Pub Date: June 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-34949-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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