A highly efficient thriller combining state-of-the-art corporate malfeasance with the old-fashioned kind. You can almost...
A Michigan furniture company CEO’s desperate bid to avoid losing control of his firm takes a back seat (or does it?) to murder most foul.
Ever since he laid off 5,000 employees—half of Stratton Corporation’s workforce—in response to a mandate from Stratton’s new owner, Fairfield Equity, everyone in Fenwick has hated “the Slasher,” Nicholas Conover. But nobody hates him more than the nutcase who’s been breaking into his gated community, scrawling threatening graffiti inside his house, and most recently eviscerating the family dog. His nerves already frayed by his wife Laura’s accidental death and his defiant teenage son, Nick gets his old hockey friend Eddie Rinaldi, now Stratton’s security chief, to install a state-of-the-art burglar alarm in the house Laura picked out not long before she died. The alarm works all too well. It’s been in place only a few days when it summons Nick to a confrontation with an intruder he shoots dead. In one of the few unbelievable moments in this adroitly plotted tale, Nick’s old buddy Eddie persuades him to hide the corpse, and from that moment on, Nick watches in anguish as Det. Audrey Rhimes closes in on the truth inch by inch. Or he would watch if he weren’t frantically trying to balance the day-by-day demands of his hurting kids with the need to do something about his suspicion that Fairfield Equity is isolating him, doing an end run around his America-first policies, and getting ready to sell him down the river—presumably to the unanimous cheers of his friends and neighbors. These headaches may not sound like enough plot for 500 pages, but Finder expertly doles out the suspense and comes up with a climactic twist altogether more plausible and satisfying than the last-minute revelation in Paranoia (2004).
A highly efficient thriller combining state-of-the-art corporate malfeasance with the old-fashioned kind. You can almost hear the movie cameras grinding away.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-31916-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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