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WHEN SHADOWS FALL

Ellison’s a competent writer, but Sam and the choir of men that falls at her feet really constitute a romance, not a...

In Ellison’s latest, Samantha Owens—a medical examiner with a tragic past—becomes enmeshed in another mysterious murder case.

Sam has left Nashville and her heartaches behind to move to Washington, D.C., and teach at a university. Now she’s starting fresh with a new love, the darkly handsome former Army Ranger Xander, and his dog, Thor, to keep her grounded. Sam wants a break from the drama and danger that permeated the cases she took on before and hopes to find a less exciting life in academia. But it’s not that easy; a beautiful, brilliant woman who magnetizes every man she meets, Sam is also a magnet for trouble. Soon it appears in the form of a letter from a Virginia man who asks her to investigate his death. Although she knows she should ignore it, she finds herself drawn in when an attorney contacts her to tell her she's in the man’s will, along with a cryptic list of other heirs. She, Xander and Fletch, a detective friend, set off to solve the puzzle, running into multiple murders, a cult and a friend who tries to recruit her for the FBI. Sharp readers will have problems with the plot from almost the first page: If the victim could send Sam a letter telling her he's been murdered and urging her to find his killer, why not tell her all he knows? That he doesn’t, instead sending her on an investigation that leads to the deaths of many others and puts her in harm’s way, makes no sense. Readers may also find Sam’s allure to every man who crosses her path, as well as her insistence on conducting police investigations even though she’s not trained for them, unrealistic.

Ellison’s a competent writer, but Sam and the choir of men that falls at her feet really constitute a romance, not a thriller.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7783-1604-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014

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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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PRETTY GIRLS

Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...

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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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