The plotting is overly complex, the prose occasionally over the top, but Stone (The Cold Truth, 1999) creates the kind of...
Confronting her department’s latest homicide, Lt. Julian Palmer, a cop on the rise, sees in it all the aspects of a potential career-breaker. The Ryans are prototypically middle-class, clean as a whistle, solid-as-they-come citizens of Troy, New York, so that when Francis Ryan, the young head of the family, is murdered, Julian knows the media will swarm. And that her gimlet-eyed boss, who dislikes her—along with her entire gender—will be all over it, too. He’ll be mining every Julian Palmer screwup for material to spike the Julian Palmer fast track. Lacking anything that even resembles a lead, she badly needs help. It just so happens that it’s suddenly available in the person of Winston (“Bear”) Edwards, the legendary ex-detective who was once her mentor. The trouble is, the ex-cop is also a fearsome ex-con just out of the slammer—despite the testimony of Julian, who five years ago had tried her hardest to put him away for good. Soon enough, the odd couple of Palmer and Edwards discovers skeletons in the spotless Ryan family closet. But Julian has secrets, too, eerily paralleling those the Ryans are hiding. And, clearly, Winston Edwards is exactly the instrument appointed to disinter them. Given his history with her, though, what will he do with what he digs up?
The plotting is overly complex, the prose occasionally over the top, but Stone (The Cold Truth, 1999) creates the kind of people who can make a reader turn pages.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-20604-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.
Helped by a beautiful grifter, the “Camel Club”—the four-man band of conspiracy theorists—returns to battle a threat to national security.
Annabelle Conroy is con-artist extraordinaire; Jerry Bagger, mobster and mark; and Roger Seagraves, master assassin. All come straight from central casting. Seagraves is killing high-level government officials, and Conroy is putting together the con of the century, with Bagger as the target. The mysterious death of a rare-books expert at the Library of Congress launches the story, which splits off at first into two different plotlines. In one, Conroy and her team work their way up to their major score. In the other, the Camel Club investigates the mysterious death of a close friend. Things are slightly more exciting in Conroy’s world. She’s assembling her team, eager to settle an old score by taking down Atlantic City’s most notorious and ruthless casino owner. After a series of capers out west to build their bankroll, the team heads back east. There’s little drama Players act out their part; marks fall. The big score comes off without a hitch. The two plots intersect halfway through. Annabelle arrives in D.C., thanks to an awkward development, along with a new piece of unfinished business. Seagraves and the Camel Club are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, and Annabelle Conroy is the special guest star. The merged stories reach a predictable conclusion. An obvious conflict remains unresolved for much of the way, setting up the next chapter in the saga.
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-53109-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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