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
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
In a hugger-mugger attempt to follow up his bestselling Absolute Power (1996), Baldacci pits a young widow against corporate villains who want her silenced at all costs. When her husband Jason apparently dies in the crash of a jetliner bound from Washington to L.A., Sidney Archer's near- perfect world implodes. A high-powered attorney working on the latest merger planned by Triton Global (a high-tech multinational that employed Jason on hush-hush computer projects), she can't accept that the beloved father of her precocious little daughter Amy is dead. Sidney's subliminal faith is not misplaced. Jason, who had shopped his company's darkest secrets in an effort to make a quick financial killing, switched planes before takeoff and is alive but not well in Seattle. On the day of his funeral, Sidney hears from him via phone. She keeps her own counsel, but Lee Sawyer (an FBI agent assigned to the case) is suspicious because available evidence suggests that Jason not only sabotaged the downed aircraft but also engineered a megabuck embezzlement. Presciently, however, the missing man had encrypted his proof of Triton's misdeeds on a duplicate disk that he mailed to himself before disappearing. Eager to get a printout that could clear Jason, Sidney sets out on a roundabout odyssey that takes her from suburban Virgina to Manhattan and points north. Although Triton's corrupt CEO and his murderous, stop-at-nothing minions are on her trail, clever Sidney foils them at almost every turn. With help from a besotted Sawyer, the pistol-packin' mama also begins unraveling the mystery of her mate's vanishing act. In a violent climactic confrontation on the stormy coast of Maine, the two learn the truth about an immense conspiracy in which Jason's fate is but a sideshow. A talky, tedious tale of an unlikely heroine's desperate life on the run, longer on confusion than suspense or narrative coherence. (Main selection of the Literary Guild; $500,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52095-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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