An entertaining, rough-and-tumble whodunit with a mix of smiles and grimaces.
In this tragicomic tale, a group of friends at a dude ranch in the high desert of California gets caught up in the sprawling web of a serial killer.
Justin Gates and his friends Gary and Terry find themselves at the Hesperia Dude Ranch as hired help under the auspices of Phil Jacobson, a kind but quirky man. Fueled by hormones and friendly competition, the boys amuse themselves with teenage camaraderie and lots of talk about the local skirts. Things turn grisly, though, as dead bodies start getting discovered; they’re all women who have been strangled, mutilated and dumped in public places. What follows is a complex romp through the lives of a handful of suspects, including a local principal involved in an affair and a no-good shopkeeper. With the guidance of Sheriff Carter, local law enforcement agents pursue every lead they can find, but the clues are often murky and sometimes seemingly contradictory. The novel is raunchy and hilarious but also full of pathos, as a number of arresting chapters offer a substantial view into the horrific, scarring upbringing of Dante Castleberg, the killer on the loose. In his lively, tonally diverse read, author Smith craftily reveals further details about the circumstances of the murders, allowing readers to feel as though they’re part of the investigation. The dialogue is eminently believable; Smith’s insights into the cocky, winner-take-all attitudes of adolescent boys—the kind who, in just one of the book’s zany incidents, would organize a drag race between a horse and a car—are piercingly accurate and often laugh-out-loud funny. None of this detracts, however, from the seriousness of the book’s main theme: terror inflicted on a community by a man who, in turn, has suffered terror at the hands of those who were supposed to care for him.
An entertaining, rough-and-tumble whodunit with a mix of smiles and grimaces.Pub Date: April 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493573509
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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