How all these little threads join up is a pleasure for Grisham fans to behold: there’s nothing particularly surprising about...
A light caper turns into a multilayered game of cat and mouse in a story that, as with most of Grisham’s (The Whistler, 2016, etc.) crime yarns, never gets too complex or deep but is entertaining all the same.
Bruce Cable is a bon vivant–ish owner of a bookstore specializing in rarities, which ought to mean he’s covered in dust instead of Florida sunshine. But he’s an aging golden boy, the perfect draw for young aspiring novelist and cute thing Mercer Mann, who’s attracted to books and Bruce and the literary scene he’s created on formerly sleepy Camino Island. It takes us a while to get to the smooth-operating Bruce, though, because Grisham’s first got to set up, with all due diligence, the misdeed to be attended to: the theft of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscripts from the Princeton library. Now, who wouldn’t want the mojo associated with holding a piece of paper out of Fitzgerald’s typewriter? Suspicion falls on Bruce, whereupon Mercer enters the picture, for a novel way has been presented to her to pay off some crushing student loans. (Always timely, Grisham is.) Eventually, Bruce and Mercer are reading between the lines and searching for clues between the sheets (“We’re not talking about love; we’re talking about sex,” Grisham writes, with a perfectly correct semicolon). But was it Bruce who pulled off the literary crime of the century? Maybe, and maybe not; Grisham leaves us guessing even as he makes clear that literary criminals don’t have to be nice guys in order to be good at their work: “He died a horrible death, Oscar, it was awful,” one particularly menacing bookworm tells a quarry once the stolen manuscripts go missing a second time. “But before he died he gave me what I wanted. You.”
How all these little threads join up is a pleasure for Grisham fans to behold: there’s nothing particularly surprising about it, but he’s a skillful spinner of mayhem and payback.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54302-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.
Sparks fly as a woman with extraordinary abilities fights her attraction to a dangerous freelance consultant.
Dr. Kendra Michaels has worked with former FBI Agent Adam Lynch before (Double Blind, 2018), but she’s furious with him for getting her tossed out of Afghanistan after she sustained a minor wound while trying to root out corruption. Kendra, who was blind until an experimental operation restored her sight at 20, has highly developed senses of smell, hearing, and spatial awareness that she’s used to help the FBI and CIA in many difficult cases. Now, as she returns to the U.S., they have another one she can’t resist investigating. Elaine Wessler and Ronald Kim, both staff members at her old school, the Woodward Academy for the Physically Disabled in Oceanside, California, have been found murdered for no apparent reason, and FBI Special Agent Michael Griffin is anxious to use her skills and inside knowledge. Elaine had been fostering an unusual guide dog, Harley, who's had problems adjusting since the child he was working with was killed in a gas-main explosion. Now that Elaine is gone, his unearthly howls are upsetting the students. Kendra talks her best friend, Olivia, who’s blind, into sharing custody of Harley until they can find him the right home. Meanwhile, she turns up clues the FBI team missed and is rewarded for her efforts with a bomb planted in her car. It turns out to be fake, but it’s still a potent warning to walk away. Returning from Afghanistan to help Kendra, Lynch finds her still angry with him and intent on resisting his charms. Her friend Jessie Mercado, a private eye, turns up to help extricate her from a dangerous situation and sticks around to join the hunt for the killers. It will take all of them, including Harley, to solve the violent, complex case and get the school Kendra loves back on track.
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6292-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Easy to read, smoothly put together. A good airport book.
An angry ex-wife is stalking a young, innocent fiancee who is a carbon copy of her former self…or so it seems.
The use of a multiviewpoint, chronologically complex narrative to create suspense by purposely misleading the reader is a really, really popular device. Two words: Gone Girl. While we are not the fools we once were and now assume immediately that we are being played, the question is whether we still take pleasure in the twists and revelations that follow. Pekkanen (The Perfect Neighbors, 2016, etc.) and Hendricks’ debut collaboration falls into the first wife/second wife subgenre of this type of story (e.g., The Girl Before, The Last Mrs. Parrish). In all of these, an unbelievably handsome, wildly successful, secretive, rigid, orderly, and controlling husband—here it’s Richard, a 36-year-old hedge fund manager with “a runner’s wiry build and an easy smile that belied his intense navy-blue eyes”—marries the same type of woman more than once, sometimes more than twice. Of course, he’s not who he seems. Perhaps the female characters are not, either. Here, we meet Nellie, an adorable New York preschool teacher who is not quite sure she wants to give up the fun, shoestring, highly social lifestyle she shares with her roomie to move to a sterile suburb with Richard. But the wedding date—of course he hasn’t even told her the location, just “buy a new bikini”—draws ever closer. Something bad happened to Nellie in Florida a long time ago that has made her anxious and hypervigilant. Meanwhile, Vanessa, the spurned wife, lives with her artist Aunt Charlotte (a great character), is boozing heavily, and is about to lose her job at Saks. She’s stalking Nellie, determined to prevent the marriage at all costs. Since you know there’s got to be more to it than this, the fun is in trying to figure it out before they tell you. We didn’t! One of the subplots, the one about the bad thing in Florida, was fresher than the main plot—maybe Hendricks and Pekkanen should have written a whole book about that.
Easy to read, smoothly put together. A good airport book.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13092-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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