by Joyce Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 2013
Thompson is back with a flourish, entertaining and challenging readers with an engaging mystery.
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A sophisticated murder mystery that explores identity issues and Santeria traditions.
Thompson (Sailing My Shoe to Timbuktu, 2003, etc.) gifts readers with a memorable, larger-than-life character in protagonist Archer Barron. A couple of years after Archer left the Santeria religion, he has yet to find a new spiritual home. He’s completed law school but hasn’t taken the bar, working instead as a night watchman on a college campus. He’s comfortable with being gay and has come to terms with his HIV-positive status, although past hurts still linger. His uneasy stability is undermined when his former madrina (or Santeria godmother) is brutally murdered, and he finds himself drawn back to old acquaintances—and confronted with old ambivalences. When a second Santeria practitioner is killed and others, including Archer, are threatened, he allies with a police detective who’s unusually sensitive to Santeria customs. The novel’s deft pacing is slow enough to allow emotional nuances to develop but fast enough to maintain reader interest. Its subplots generally contribute to the main story, although its shifts in place and time period may not always initially be clear. Thompson expertly sketches characters of different ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations and religious backgrounds, and she imbues even minor characters with individuality and scrupulously avoids caricature. Her dialogue is natural and credible, with Archer showing humor (“Okay, it’s true, I prefer opera to hip-hop, one more way that gay trumps black. Get over it.”) and insight (“Guilt was my fellow traveller and always had been, a life sentence and a soulmate all in one, my dark familiar.”). The novel offers an intriguing inside look at Santeria rituals and customs, but some readers may get bogged down in the specific terminology. Overall, however, the author delivers a suspenseful, intelligent tale.
Thompson is back with a flourish, entertaining and challenging readers with an engaging mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1590212714
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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New York Times Bestseller
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
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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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