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SECRET PREY

Deputy chief of Minneapolis PD Lucas Davenport returns for Sandford’s ninth outing in the well-received Prey procedurals (Sudden Prey, 1996, etc.). The cop ripostes herein are a brilliantly welcome routine and rival the richly characterized acid blackness of TV’s Homicide show. Unique for the series is Davenport’s bipolar disorder, with the gloom-ridden hero often on the verge of a total depressive breakdown, despite the heartening presence of fellow cop Sherrill, her statuesque figure drawing attention away from the chrome revolver in her shoulder holster. Sadly, the bloody violence of Davenport’s LaChaise case has cost him his fiancÇe, Weather Karkinnen—they’re both seeing a shrink about it. Ironically, Davenport’s battle with depression turns out to be a help in the present case, when his disorder leads him to the Prozac clue that eventually solves a central group of murders. Five bank-company executives are on a hunt on opening day of deer season when the company’s chairman takes a slug through the heart. Before novel’s end, only two of the execs are left alive, which certainly cuts down on the suspects. Why was chairman Daniel S. Kresge shot? Because he has just bamboozled his wife into accepting an $8 million divorce settlement and is merging his 230 banks with a larger, a move that will net him $40 million after taxes? Yes, he’ll lose his job, as will nearly all the execs on the deer hunt, but that’s life. As is revenge. Lucas’s clues pile up as an unknown woman keeps shipping them to him by mail and phone. But a perplexed Davenport soon has something else to solve: Someone, for reasons unknown, firebombs Weather’s house. Are his cases related? Events from earlier Prey novels weave intriguingly through this one, inviting the reader to plunge into the entire series. Not a bad idea.

Pub Date: May 11, 1998

ISBN: 0-399-14382-3

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998

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THE A LIST

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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BOOK OF THE DEAD

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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