by John Lescroart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2010
Worth reading only for Lescroart’s customary sharp-edged portrait of the myriad temptations San Francisco offers citizens...
A month from throwing in the towel, Wyatt Hunt gets a chance to put his faltering private-investigation firm back on the map.
Ever since The Hunt Club made headlines and trod on important San Francisco toes in its first big case (The Hunt Club, 2006), his name has been anathema in police circles, and spooked clients have stayed away too. But when Hunt tells aspiring chef Mickey Dade, his driver and sometime fieldworker, that he’s going to have to let him go, Mickey makes a counter-offer. Fresh from discovering the body of wealthy activist/philanthropist Dominic Como, Mickey has heard that Hunt’s old nemesis, Inspector Devin Juhle, is looking to pin the murder on Alicia Thorpe, a volunteer at Como’s principal charity, Sunset Youth Project (SYP). Hunt could make the rounds of the organizations Como funded, Mickey suggests, get them to put up a substantial reward for information leading to a conviction and ride the attendant publicity back into the limelight. It’s a pleasure to watch Hunt—at first diffident, then increasingly confident—persuade the executive directors of Mission Coalition, Sanctuary House and SYP to pony up. In a particularly zesty turn of events, grieving widow Ellen Como adds a substantial sum to the reward even as she’s promising to claim the whole pot if her announcement that her husband was carrying on with Alicia closes the case. Alas, it’s all downhill from there. Despite a second murder, there’s little excitement in Juhle’s pursuit of Alicia; The Hunt Club’s investigation mainly turns up the unsurprising news that there’s a lot of civic corruption in the Bay Area; and the denouement, in which Hunt summons all the leading figures in the case to his office so that he can identify the killer by spotting discrepancies in the suspects’ stories, will make you think you’ve wandered into an antique bookstore.
Worth reading only for Lescroart’s customary sharp-edged portrait of the myriad temptations San Francisco offers citizens with money and power.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95144-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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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