Hooper's latest paranormal romance (After Caroline, 1996, etc.) tackles reincarnation in a modern southern gothic mode, with lots of coupling in the gazebo. The benighted Kilbourne family has not known a natural death in 150 years. No one dies in bed, and all the men seem to meet their maker somewhere before middle age. At an improbable super- duper garage sale at the magnificent Kilbourne estate in Atlanta, Laura Sutherland buys a small hand mirror made in 1800. Laura has always been obsessed with mirrors, though she doesn't know why, any more than she understands her other eccentricities: her refusal to cut her red hair, for example, and a dislike of Christmas. Right after handsome Peter Kilbourne offers to buy back the antique mirror from her, he's murdered, and Laura immediately becomes a suspect. In order to clear herself, she visits the Kilbournes—and runs right into panther-like Daniel Kilbourne, virtual head of the family. Her reaction to him is something beyond chemical: It's immediate and cosmic, and apparently Daniel feels the same. Meantime, he's involved in a power struggle with the family matriarch, Amelia, who asks Laura to stick around and paint her portrait. During stormy nights at the Kilbournes', Laura and Daniel become lovers. (Two other romances also play out amid the search for Peter's killer.) And while all this is happening, a college student is researching the colorful history of the mirror. In no time at all, the reseacher discovers that it has always been owned by lovers: not just garden-variety married couples, but passionate, inseparable beloveds who meet mainly because of the mirror. Could it be that the same two lovers have been reincarnated, and then re-reincarnated, over the past two centuries? Despite the adult sex and good surprise ending: a treacly adolescent affair, just a few steps beyond paper dolls and Barbie.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-09949-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
It's clearly Cat’s meow, and if you respond positively to her tempestuous carryings-on, then you'll probably forgive Iles...
A serial killer who puts the bite on victims is the villainous center of a long, long psychothriller, as southern Gothic as it gets.
Dr. Catherine (Cat) Ferry is a forensic odontologist, which is to say “an expert on human teeth and the damage they can do.” In four cases enlivening the New Orleans crime scene, however, the damage done is mostly posthumous, the victims having been snuffed first, gnawed on afterward. Cat loves being called in to help NOPD investigations. She also loves a hunky homicide detective named Sean Regan. At some point, Sean says, he will leave his wife and kids for her, but it’s a point of diminishing probability. Hard to really blame Sean, feckless as he is, since Cat’s not only bipolar, alcoholic and promiscuous but also apparently content to remain that way. And then, leaning over the chewed-upon corpse of Arthur LeGendre, she has a panic attack that amounts to an epiphany. Something’s wrong, she intuits, and makes a beeline for home in Natchez, Miss. Somehow, she has sensed a connection between the New Orleans murders and dark doings in her own past. Twenty years ago, when Cat was eight, her daddy was shot to death. A mysterious assailant, grandpapa Kirkland has insisted through the years, but Cat has always found that difficult to accept. Now, in her old bedroom in the family manse, she unexpectedly discovers forensic evidence that supports her skepticism—and discovers as well gleanings of a terrible secret. In the meantime, back in New Orleans, the investigation has heated up, and here too it seems Cat had it right. Murder in New Orleans and murder in Natchez are connected by the same kind of terrible secret.
It's clearly Cat’s meow, and if you respond positively to her tempestuous carryings-on, then you'll probably forgive Iles (The Footprints of God, 2003, etc.) his unabashed quest for bestsellerdom.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3470-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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