by Jeri Westerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2018
A bit of history and folklore and a touch of romance combine to challenge the faithful hero in a case closest to his heart.
A disgraced knight with an unwanted affinity for reliquaries is involved in yet another puzzle involving one.
Crispin Guest, the Tracker, lost his status and almost his head when he followed his conscience in his choice for king. Now he tries to maintain his knightly skills while earning a living as a solver of puzzles (Season of Blood, 2017, etc.). He lives in London in a former shop with his apprentice, Jack Tucker, and Jack's very pregnant wife, Isabel. Crispin is approached by Father Bulthius of St. Modwen’s Church, who claims that corpses from his graveyard climb out and walk by night and begs Crispin to come and see for himself. Although they find signs of disturbances and corpses with blood on their mouths, Crispin, ever the skeptic, seeks another answer for the strange goings-on. More important to him is a summons from Philippa Walcote, the woman he loved, who married another man. Philippa and her husband, Clarence, beg Crispin to save Christopher, their 7-year-old son, from a pending murder charge. Accused of stabbing their neighbor John Horne and trying to steal a relic, the boy says only that it was his fault. And no wonder, for he was in the room where Horne died, and his knife was the weapon. Crispin is shocked to discover that Christopher looks just like he did as a child and is obviously his own son. Fortunately, one of the two sheriffs admires his skills and gives him free rein to investigate. The missing relic, a bone stored in a red painted cow statue, attributed to St. Modwen, turns up at Crispin’s home, and, although he returns it to Horne’s not noticeably grieving widow, it just keeps reappearing. Crispin works hard with Jack to solve the churchyard puzzle, but even harder to save his son from death.
A bit of history and folklore and a touch of romance combine to challenge the faithful hero in a case closest to his heart.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8794-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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New York Times Bestseller
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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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
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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