Readers will savor getting to know this singular heroine, a cop who feels the call of a lost child as sharply as the knife’s...
A troubled FBI agent must find a missing teen while coming to terms with her father’s impending death in the pseudonymous Ellis’ satisfying debut.
Special Agent Elsa Myers of the New York City Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Unit is good at her job, but it doesn’t quite explain why she’s pulled away from her father’s bedside to join in the hunt for Ruby Haverstock, a missing 17-year-old girl. Elsa is partnered with former NYPD vice detective Alexei “Lex” Cole, who’s new to missing persons cases. Lex turns out to be an able partner, but he irritates as much as intrigues Elsa, who isn’t one to get close to anyone—and is hiding her own secrets. Over the course of about a week, Elsa and Lex’s search takes them into the mind of a man with a dark mission, one they must decipher before it’s too late. Ellis writes with a lyrical economy, alternating between glimpses into Elsa’s fraught childhood and the case at hand. Elsa loves her father but resents him for not shielding her from the vicious punishments meted out by her mother, who was killed when Elsa was 16. The insights into Elsa’s pain and her crippling compulsion to cut herself, honed while hiding from her mother's violent outbursts, are particularly affecting: “She scratches every neon-pulsing scar on her legs, hips, stomach, arms. The pictogram of her failures heat to the hard edges of her fingernails, the crude blade-drawn outlines of sometimes something—a closed eye with lashes, a bird able to fly away, a marble capable of rolling away unseen, the number 7 because she once thought it was lucky—and often nothing, just scratches, cuts tallied on her skin.”
Readers will savor getting to know this singular heroine, a cop who feels the call of a lost child as sharply as the knife’s edge that she uses to score her own skin.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-50566-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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