All the prodigious energy and ingenuity of a canny performer who just doesn’t know when to quit.
In this fifth case pitting quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme against a murderous magician, Deaver (The Stone Monkey, 2002, etc.) tries his best to outdo himself—and brother, does it show.
Rhyme’s adventures, in which the armchair detective has depended on NYPD Officer Amelia Sachs for his legwork (and lately for emotional succor as well), have always traded on dexterous sleight-of-hand, so it’s only natural to literalize the metaphor in the Conjuror, the malevolent illusionist who first seems bent on dispatching a random collection of New Yorkers through diverse means at precise intervals of four hours. Of course, there’s a deeper method beneath this murderous madness; of course, the mechanics of each homicidal outrage—the Russian flautist strangled by a Houdini-designed rope tie called the Lazy Hangman, the gay makeup artist sawed in half, the equestrian lawyer chained and dunked by her ankles into a Central Park pond—are fiendishly inventive and the detective work equally so; and, of course, Deaver keeps the suspense taut by repeatedly bringing the cops face to face with the Conjuror at the crime scenes and repeatedly showing him slipping through their fingers. Even so, the staggering pile of red herrings Deaver tosses in to misdirect his fans and, more improbably, the cops—is the Conjuror avenging himself on the circus manager who let his wife die in a fire? is he scheming to break upstate militiaman Andrew Constable out of jail before his trial begins? is he planning to assassinate the ADA who’s trying Constable’s high-profile case?—eventually loses its sheen, and the manhunt ends in a sprawling, anticlimactic third act in which Deaver shamelessly pulls one rabbit after another from his hat, forgetting that the trick is to find one really good rabbit and pull hard.
All the prodigious energy and ingenuity of a canny performer who just doesn’t know when to quit.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2200-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.
On his way to the West Coast, Jack Reacher takes a detour to New Hampshire to check out some family history in the 23rd book in Child's (The Midnight Line, 2017, etc.) series.
Laconia, New Hampshire, is the setting for the latest showcase for Reacher's unconscious talent for stirring up the latent murderous violence in any bucolic setting he chooses to enter. In this case, the hubbub comes in the form of a local mob family after Reacher unleashes his own form of discipline on a younger member of the clan when the beardless thug attempts to assault a waitress. Paid muscle is soon on the way north from Boston, but both Reacher and his constant readers know that kind of goon is never a match for him. And so Reacher and reader are free to ponder the puzzling story about our hero's past. It seems that there is no official record of Reacher's dad, who grew up in Laconia, but there is evidence to suggest he may have played a hand in the murder of a sociopath terrorizing the town in his day. All of this is intercut with the ordeal of a young Canadian couple driving south to New York to score some money by selling the goods they've got hidden away in a suitcase. Their car breaks down just outside a remote motel that, they gradually discover, is not as welcoming as it seems. It doesn't take long to figure out what's waiting for them there, though it takes a bit too long for Reacher's story to join theirs. Nevertheless, the tone doesn't go blooey here, as it has in some of the recent series entries, and the way everything winds up for all the participants shows a satisfying generosity of storytelling spirit.
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59351-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Though the heroine’s love life may be less interesting to mystery fans than her amateur sleuthing, Kies’ fiction debut lays...
A hard-living newspaperwoman juggles multiple men and battles the bottle on her way to redemption via a high-profile murder story.
Punching a cop lands Sheffield Post reporter Geneva Chase on probation, with mandatory attendance at AA meetings as a chaser. But a grisly multiple murder at wealthy George and Lynette Chadwick’s home on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound might be Genie’s ticket to redemption. The Chadwick homicides aren’t the only high-profile crime stories on her radar. She’s also following the case of Jimmy Fitzgerald, a spoiled rich kid recently arrested for murder and, in the view of Genie’s tart first-person narrative, a sociopath. Meantime, an unexpected upsurge in her love life challenges her resolve to keep her sobriety and her eye on the journalistic ball. When she runs into childhood pal Kevin Bell at an AA meeting, she finds herself drawn to his adorable awkwardness. And out of the blue, her hot ex Frank Mancini calls, wanting to rekindle a romance she’d thought was dead. As she ricochets from Frank to Kevin, Genie also toils in the trenches on various stories. She gets injured by a burglar in a HumVee while tracking a series of local robberies and gingerly explores the discreet local S&M scene’s ties to those murders. Her research on this big crime includes the history of the house and the lives of the victims.
Though the heroine’s love life may be less interesting to mystery fans than her amateur sleuthing, Kies’ fiction debut lays the groundwork for an entertaining series.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0800-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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