Nonstop drive, dialogue that amuses and surprises, deft characterizations. But most notable of what Sandford continues to...
By the time a series gets appreciably past its salad days, the signs of writer fatigue are usually unmistakable. Which is what makes this 14th outing from Sandford so remarkable: the brilliant Prey series goes bopping along, taking steps two at a time, acting like your basic spring chicken.
Series hero Lucas Davenport (Mortal Prey, 2002, etc.), self-styled “richest cop in Minnesota”—with a fortune derived from the design of beautifully complex computer games—has a new job, crime-solving for Governor Elmer Henderson: that is, taking on those hot-potato assignments deemed political dynamite. When Deon Cash, a black man, and Jane Warr, a white woman, are found naked and dead, dangling from a tree in backwater Broderick, the Governor’s men hurriedly summon Lucas, the word “lynching” much in the air. But it’s not a lynching. To begin with, Broderick, a six-hour drive from St. Paul, simply doesn’t have that kind of problem. Moreover, it doesn’t take long for the real motive to surface: vengeance. Cash and Warr, it turns out, kidnapped and killed the young daughter of prominent Minnesota businessman Hale Sorrell. Acting as judge, jury, and hangman, Sorell has meted out vigilante justice, and savvy Lucas nails him for it—but before Sorrell can be arrested, he, too, is gunned down. Now Lucas surmises that more than Cash and Warr were involved in the kidnap plot. Back to Broderick he goes, where the evidence leads in an unforeseen direction. And where 12-year-old Letty West, freckled and gritty (“she might have been a female Huckleberry Finn”) does a lot to capture a sociopathic killer—as well as Lucas’s unexpectedly susceptible heart.
Nonstop drive, dialogue that amuses and surprises, deft characterizations. But most notable of what Sandford continues to do—better, perhaps, than anyone in crime fiction—is humanize his monsters: that makes for a special kind of creepiness.Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15043-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.
A plucky group of early-20th-century detectives (Murder on Trinity Place, 2019, etc.) takes on the Black Hand.
The leads include Frank Malloy and Gino Donatelli, former police officers who started a detective agency after an unexpected legacy made Malloy a wealthy man; Malloy’s wife, Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy society family who runs a maternity clinic for the poor; and their nanny, Maeve, a budding sleuth who works in Malloy’s office. All of them leap to attention when Gino’s sister-in-law Teodora reports that Jane Harding, a worker at the settlement house where Teo volunteers, has been kidnapped by the Black Hand, who are notorious for abducting the wives and children of anyone who can afford to pay ransom. The New York Police Department is corrupt, and the local Italian immigrants never report crimes. Mr. McWilliam, who runs the settlement house, had asked Jane to marry him, but she’d asked him to allow her to experience more of the single life before deciding. Seeking clues, Sarah visits Mrs. Cassidi, an earlier kidnapping victim who’s refused to talk to anyone, in hopes that her nursing experience and sympathetic manner will get results. Mrs. Cassidi admits to being raped but knows little about where she was held captive, a quiet place in a house where she could hear children. Soon after Nunzio Esposito, a leader of the Black Hand, tells Malloy that no one’s been taken from the settlement house, Jane suddenly reappears but refuses to discuss where she’s been. Lisa Prince, Jane’s well-to-do cousin, reluctantly agrees to take her in even though Jane’s jealous of her wealth and can be unpleasant to deal with. When Esposito’s found murdered in a flat he rented for his mistress, Gino, who’s just arrived on the scene, is arrested. Now the clever sleuths must solve both the murder and the abductions to clear Gino’s name.
A middling mystery with telling historical details and the usual pleasures provided by the regulars’ interpersonal dynamics.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0574-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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