Dependable British thriller-factory Follett (A Place Called Freedom, 1995, etc.) continues his infatuation with all things American, this time with a contemporary, Baltimore-based page-turner about cloned kids. Six-foot-tall, passionately athletic, with a taste for toned-down punk fashion, Dr. Jeannie Farrari is, nevertheless, a typical headstrong professional whose work, research into identical twins raised apart, is first encouraged and then thwarted by her mentor, Berisford Jones—a sixtysomething, womanizing genetics professor, who also heads Genetico, a gene-splicing company that's about to be purchased by a European firm for $180 million. Jones and fellow Genetico shareholders stand to profit if only the Europeans don't discover a supersecret government cloning experiment Genetico pulled off back in the old days of the Nixon Administration. The results of that experiment, a failed attempt to breed the ultimate soldier, are still alive—handsome, identical, mostly antisocial 22-year-old (infinity)bermenschen ignorant of their unnatural origins. When a good clone, pre-law student Steve Logan, is mistakenly identified as a rapist, Jeannie puts her newfangled twin-spotting computer program to work. Hoping to stop her, Jones sics a fictitious New York Times "ethics reporter" on her, whose tritely unethical journalism compels the university to deprive Jeannie, a great teacher, of her job. Twisting the conventions of the woman-in-peril genre, Follett has his plucky heroine alternately menaced and romanced by clones good, bad, and homicidal. Along the way, he winks coyly at cops, lovers, and parents who fail to see beyond appearances. More meaningfully, he describes with extraordinary accuracy the frustrations that rape victims encounter when seeking justice. It all percolates to a heady climax as Jeannie and Logan jigger a Genetico press conference with guest appearances by you-know-who, and who, and who. . . . A slow starter whose sly plotting and rousing melodrama are dulled by Follett's bleached, lackluster prose and, for all their contrived eccentricities, his bleached, lackluster characters.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70296-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.
V.I. Warshawski’s search for a homeless woman with a fraught past leads her deep into a series of political conspiracies that stretch over generations and continents.
Bernadine Fouchard, V.I.’s goddaughter, thinks that Lydia Zamir, whose songs about strong women she reveres, was shot dead along with her lover, Hector Palurdo, at a Kansas fundraiser four years ago. She’s only half right. The 17 victims ranch hand Arthur Morton shot in Horsethief Canyon include Palurdo but not Zamir, whom V.I. and Bernie happen to hear banging out haunting tunes on a toy piano under a Chicago railroad viaduct. But they glimpse her only momentarily before the traumatized musician flees and eventually disappears. Soon afterward, Bernie finds herself in trouble when the young man she’s been dating—Leo Prinz, a summer employee of SLICK, the South Lakefront Improvement Council—is murdered and she becomes a person of considerable interest to Sgt. Lenora Pizzello. The search for Lydia Zamir morphs into an investigation of her relationship with Palurdo, an activist against the Pinochet regime in Chile long before he was shot apparently at random. In the meantime, the disappearance of Simon Lensky, one of SLICK’s elected managers, throws a spotlight on the organization’s controversial proposal for a new landfill on the South Side. Everyone in the city seems to have strong opinions about the proposal, from Gifford Taggett, superintendent of the Chicago Park District, to Nobel Prize–winning economist Larry Nieland, to an inveterate protestor known only as Coop, who kicks off the story by vanishing after parking his dog with V.I., to her consternation and the ire of her neighbors and her own two dogs. As usual, Paretsky (Shell Game, 2018, etc.) is less interested in identifying whodunit than in uncovering a monstrous web of evil, and this web is one of her densest and most finely woven ever.
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243592-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Jones hits his stride with a smart story of social commentary—it’s scary good.
A violent tale of vengeance, justice, and generational trauma from a prolific horror tinkerer.
Jones (Mapping the Interior, 2017, etc.) delivers a thought-provoking trip to the edge of your seat in this rural creature feature. Four young Blackfeet men ignore the hunting boundaries of their community and fire into an elk herd on land reserved for the elders, but one elk proves unnaturally hard to kill. Years later, they’re forced to answer for their act of selfish violence, setting into motion a supernatural hunt in which predator becomes prey. The plot meanders ever forward, stopping and starting as it vies for primacy with the characters. As Jones makes his bloody way through the character rotation, he indulges in reflections on rural life, community expectations, and family, among other things, but never gets lost in the weeds. From the beer bottles decorating fences to free-throw practice on the old concrete pad in the cold, the Rez and its silent beauty establishes itself as an important character in the story, and one that each of the other characters must reckon with before the end. Horror’s genre conventions are more than satisfied, often in ways that surprise or subvert expectations; fans will grin when they come across clever nods and homages sprinkled throughout that never feel heavy-handed or too cute. While the minimalist prose propels the narrative, it also serves to establish an eerie tone of detachment that mirrors the characters’ own questions about what it means to live distinctly Native lives in today's world—a world that obscures the line between what is traditional and what is contemporary. Form and content strike a delicate balance in this work, allowing Jones to revel in his distinctive voice, which has always lingered, quiet and disturbing, in the stark backcountry of the Rez.
Jones hits his stride with a smart story of social commentary—it’s scary good.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3645-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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