A possibly forged French masterpiece provides the battleground for an archly amusing game of cat and mouse. Charles Vermeille is the world’s premier expert on the work of 17th-century master Claude Lorrain. From his eminent perch at the College de France, the widower Vermeille—arrogant, imperious, and plainspoken—hands down edicts on the authenticity of Lorrain’s oft-copied work whose authority is beyond appeal. But all is not well with Charles. Soon after returning from a conference at which he declined to fall under the well-exercised spell of British preservationist Jane Caldwell, he begins to receive photographs of his adored son Jean-Louis. The photos themselves are innocuous—the young man is surfing, playing tennis, reading on a balcony—but their regular arrival, postmarked from all over Europe and unaccompanied by a word of explanation or demand, soon comes to seem sinister. Nor does a panicky visit to Berkeley, where Jean-Louis, hale and happy, is studying for an M.B.A., alleviate Charles’s fears or stem the ominous flow of photos, one of them now accompanied by a newspaper clipping recounting the Onassis heir’s death. Who could be tormenting Charles in such an exquisitely oblique way? Reviewing and rejecting all his obvious enemies (whom his agonized list rather implausibly restricts to three), Charles can only assume that his ordeal has something to do with his expertise in Lorrain. But Fiechter, in a plot closely reminiscent of his Death by Publication (1995), has already broadly hinted that the scorned Jane is the perpetrator. In an impassioned bid to get revenge on her own distant father who ignored and undervalued her even before paralysis made him a vegetable—a father she can’t help seeing in Charles’she’s concocted a cleverly symmetrical scheme to capitalize on Charles’s love for his son. What that scheme is, and how it fares, are matters best left to Fiechter’s telling. Slight, elegant, and urbane, with a malicious final twist that’s as perfectly effervescent as chilled champagne.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-430-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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