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DOUBLE JEOPARDY

``Everything will come in twos,'' announces geomancer Bouc Bel- Air to Paul Bergman, one of the placidly nondescript heroes of this waggish fantasia circling vaguely around themes of lost love, friendship, wandering, and curiously weightless felony—most of them appearing, yes, in twos. Let's see, now. Paul and his friend Bob, both in languid romantic pursuit of Justine Fischer, run afoul of comic-opera Belgian ganglord Lucien Van Os and his witless hangers-on Plankaert and Toon—who press them into running guns on the ailing steamer Boustrophedon, bound from Le Havre for Malaya, where Paul's uncle Jeff Pons (``the Duke'') has been maintaining his power as overseer of the Jouvin rubber plantation by encouraging the Aw brothers, Aw Sam and Aw Aw, to organize a labor movement just efficacious enough to be menacing. Meanwhile, Jeff and his longtime friend Charles Pontiac—who's gone underground in the Metro, surfacing only to pick up his laundry—are linked by their pursuit 30 years since of Justine's mother Nicole, who rejected them both for an aviator who promptly crashed near the Duke's plantation. (Any questions so far?) Despite a plot that includes a mutiny and a counter-mutiny, a bank robbery, two kidnappings, and a touching reunion between the Duke and his long-lost nephew, every melodramatic incident is served up with an understated spin that cancels it out, and the characters, in all their undying friendship and unrequited passion, have no more solidity than Baby Love, Nicole's Pekingese—so that it's not really surprising when Paul, rescued by Charles and Bob, agrees to give his kidnapper a lift back to the 14th arrondissement. Full of little twists and crackles of linguistic static, courtesy of Echenoz and his faithful translator, that stand in for the traditional rewards of the narrative contract—very much in the elaborately inconsequential manner of Echenoz's apparently one-of-a- kind Cherokee (1987). Raymond Queneau, meet Gilbert and Sullivan.

Pub Date: April 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-87923-916-6

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Godine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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BOOK OF THE DEAD

Proceed at your own risk.

Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”

Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.

Proceed at your own risk.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

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