by John Sandford ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
Vivid cast, bristling action, neat surprises—and it's funny. Probably the cop novel of the year.
Professional hit-woman Clara Rinker returns for another shot at Lucas Davenport as the brilliant Prey series reaches 13 with nary a sign of dross on its gloss.
What Sandford does as well if not better than any other crime fiction writer is make good villains. Though his Clara Rinker kills for money, he puts so human a face on her it requires an act of will to resist her appeal. We meet her first as victim (shrewd Sandford), ambushed, gunned down in cold-blood. Fatally wounded in the same ambush is her lover, the man whose child she was carrying. Since Paulo was the son of a notorious Mexican crime family, conventional wisdom names him as the mark. During her long convalescence, however, Clara has a chance to rethink that. Back in St. Louis, where she made her world-class reputation, there are five powerful men who regularly hired her gun and who might have begun to worry about how deeply she was clued into their various nefarious operations. She decides they've formed a cabal against her and that it's time to become proactive. At this point, enter series hero Lucas Davenport (Chosen Prey, 2001, etc.), one of the few ever to survive a one-on-one with Clara (Certain Prey, 1999). In his day job, Lucas is Minneapolis's Deputy Police Chief, but the FBI drafts him for an all-out war. Like the talented guerilla she is, Clara strikes with elegant ferocity, taking out her targets as planned, staying an infuriating step ahead of all her adversaries, including Lucas. But Lucas scares her. While she likes and respects him, she knows there's no safety for her until she kills him. Which parallels precisely the way Lucas feels about her.
Vivid cast, bristling action, neat surprises—and it's funny. Probably the cop novel of the year.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14863-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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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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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