Looking for some relief from the omnipresent headlines about Theodore Kaczynski, Oklahoma City, and the World Trade Center plot? You won't find it in this Mad Bomber tale, which cleverly draws on all these stories and more. A couple of years after an amateurish package of gelignite disfigures his right hand and gets him pensioned off from the NYPD's bomb disposal unit, ex-Sgt. Will Harper drops in on Jimmy Fahey, the former acolyte who swapped the tension of disarming explosive devices—he was on the scene when Harper got blasted into retirement—for a cushy job running security ops for paranoid, successful thriller author Rod Buckner. Buckner's convinced against all reason that he needs state-of-the-art protection, but none of it protects him against a bomb that goes off just as Harper is leaving the neighborhood. A close shave for Harper—but Harold Addleman, whose alcoholism got him kicked off the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, is convinced that it's much more besides: It's the work of a serial bomber with a taste for famous targets, like tennis player Tim Sothern and Congresswoman Susan Burton Wylie, and a truly scary ability to learn from his own mistakes. Working with Addleman, Harper painstakingly reconstructs a pattern of 22 deaths he can lay to the Celebrity Bomber, and predicts that the 23rd will be blowhard radio commentator Speed Rogers. But all his warnings aren't enough to get through to megalomaniac Rogers or his high-powered, clueless staff (a bit of partisan malice makes this episode especially stinging), and the bomber chalks up another victory and prepares for his climactic strike in Washington, D.C., home to more famous people than Harper, despite his newfound credibility, can possibly protect. The cat-and-mouse game is expertly routine. But veteran Lutz (Oops!, p. 22, etc.) and pseudonymous August shine in dramatizing the up-and-down power of Harper's own dubious celebrity, which makes him a target for a dozen agendas besides the bomber's.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57566-259-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the...
A sociopath targets a suburban Pennsylvania psychiatrist whose success is only the prelude to a series of nightmarish reversals.
It’s true that Dr. Eric Parrish doesn’t have everything. His wife, Caitlin, is divorcing him and being difficult over the joint custody they’ve arranged for their 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, and his latest private patient, 17-year-old Max Jakubowski, seems much more in need of help than his dying grandmother does. But Eric’s colleagues like and admire him—one of them, medical student Kristine Malin, is clearly in hot pursuit—and so does U.S. News and World Report, which is about to announce that the psych unit Eric heads at Havemeyer General Hospital ranks second in the nation. It all goes south with a suddenness that would be shocking outside the pages of Scottoline. Kristine files harassment charges after Eric rejects her come-on. Max phones Eric to say that his grandmother’s died and then takes a powder. Renée Bevilacqua, a girl Max tutors in math and otherwise worships from afar, gets murdered the morning after Eric follows her home, looking in vain for a lead to Max’s whereabouts. The cops haul Eric in as a person of interest, then invade his office and home looking for evidence when he demands they find Max, whom he considers a suicide risk, but won’t say any more about him. The colleagues who so recently toasted Eric lock him out. And that’s all before Max takes five teenagers hostage and announces that he’s going to kill one every 15 minutes before he blows up the King of Prussia Mall. Who can possibly be pulling so many different strings?
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the wall for a troubled teen as she ever was with Bennie Rosato’s all-female law practice (Betrayed, 2014, etc.).Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01011-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.
A body washed up on the shore of Lake Superior moves a family to rewrite its 100-year history in Webb's (The Vanishing, 2014, etc.) new novel, set equally in each era.
Lake Superior, which has always been known for its legends, one day reveals a new mystery when an unidentified body clutching an equally dead baby washes up on the shore near Kate Granger’s family home. Kate, who’s come to town only recently in an attempt to recover from a breakup with her philandering husband, is captivated by the young woman, who’s been appearing to her in dreams. Police know the family too well to suspect Kate was involved in the crime, and she’s allowed to travel within the area to stay with her cousin Simon at the Harrison’s House, a stately former family home the unerringly nice Simon inherited and that he and his partner, Jonathan, have revamped into a B&B. Interspersed with chapters about Kate’s search for the identity of the body is the story of Great Bay in 1889 and the early life of Addie Cassatt and her friend Jess Stewart. Addie’s story sounds almost like a fable, from her birth in a lake that seems to love her to her first meeting with Jess, a boy who seems fated to be always by her side. Things grow more complicated when Jess goes away to college and begins to wonder about life beyond his small town and to ask whether Addie can be the woman he needs to help him achieve his professional dreams. As Addie learns about the limits of love, Kate learns that love may return when she’s introduced to Nick, a police officer willing to invest as much time in identifying the body as Kate is. With the support of Simon and Nick, Kate tries to learn from her dreams and believe the impossible, even if it means connecting the body to a centuries-old mystery entangled with Kate and Simon’s own family history.
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0082-0
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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