Lacking the architectural skills to sustain an almost 500-page novel, Mercer takes a big step back into well-upholstered...
More is less in this overblown fourth round of murder and maiming for amnesiac Los Angeles TV correspondent Ariel Gold (Split Image, 1998, etc.).
A predawn phone call warns Ariel that her yoga teacher, Laya, has been blinded (permanently?) by maliciously tainted eyedrops, presumably to prevent her from identifying the two miscreants she saw beating a man to death in an alley shortly before. Back at her desk at TV newsmagazine Open File, after her initial struggle to get independent Laya to try psychotherapy and a cornea transplant, Ariel gets an even more disturbing message in a letter marked “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.” The writer, identifying herself only as Dorothy, worries about a mutual acquaintance who’s killed once and may kill again; she begs Ariel to call her. Obviously Ariel is supposed to know both Dorothy and the suspected murderer, but her amnesia makes unearthing any memory of them an intolerably extended exercise as she questions her wealthy grandfather and networks with his socialite friends, dividing her time between L.A. and the Bay Area. Ariel’s silky doggedness in pursuing every lead, no matter how unpromising or unfruitful, suggests a police procedural with the long-suffering police replaced by a well-connected celebrity newscaster who’s got resources. It’s an incongruous mix, made insufferable by the inconsequentiality of most of the chitchat. Mercer, who seems less interested in wrapping up either case than in continuing the process of unfolding her heroine’s family romance, pads the package as if she were being paid by the word, and both plotlines end up fizzling out in a shower of anticlimactic sparks.
Lacking the architectural skills to sustain an almost 500-page novel, Mercer takes a big step back into well-upholstered fluff that makes Mary Higgins Clark look like a master.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-03424-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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