A star athlete whose life has fallen apart finds that there’s still no place like home.
Chase Ford, the star of his high school basketball team, won a free ride to college and played for the Lakers before an accident ruined his knee and his career and his dependence on pain pills ruined his marriage to a famous singer. Now he’s paying a short visit to his hometown before he decides whether to accept the offer of an announcer’s job. Despite his success with basketball and women, he can’t shake his unhappy childhood. His mother was paralyzed in an accident, and his coldhearted father’s liaison with the woman he hired to care for the house produced a child Chase has never met. His return coincides with the murders of Jimmie Riley, the star of the Brandon Buffalos basketball team, and of Chase’s old coach. His high school nemesis, Sheriff Lincoln Kendall, is all too eager to tie Chase to those deaths. Chase, who’s secretly been helping those in need by paying their tax bills and other debts, plans to arrange a college account for Dolly Benavidez, his half sister. He still has special friends from high school: Marty, now a sheriff’s deputy; Birdie Hawkins, the game warden who always loved him; and Mercy Saylor, the high school beauty who played Chase and Kendall off against each other. Birdie, who generally has little time for the sheriff, points out a clue from the Riley crime scene: the print of a woman’s size Tony Lama boot, not exactly rare in Colorado farm and ranch country. Chase must sort through numerous suspects and layers of hidden undercurrents if he’s ever to resolve the conflicts in his life.
A humdinger of a first novel that brings together several gripping storylines, an appealingly flawed hero, and an intimate sense of life in small-town America.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10316-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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In Baldacci’s 19th (True Blue, 2009, etc.), boy and girl monster-hunters meet cute.
Evan Waller, aka Fadir Kuchin, aka “the Butcher of Kiev,” aka “the Ukrainian psychopath,” is one of those deep-dyed villains a certain kind of fiction can’t do without. Serving with distinction as part of the Soviet Union’s KGB, he joyfully and indiscriminately killed thousands. Now, many years later, posing as a successful businessman, he’s vacationing in Provence where, unbeknownst to him, two separate clandestine operations are being mounted by people who do not regard him with favor. Reggie Campion—28 and gorgeous—spearheads the first, an ad hoc group of monster-hunting vigilantes. Studly, tall Shaw (no first name supplied) is point guard for a rival team, shadowy enough to leave the matter of its origin ambiguous. While their respective teams reconnoiter and jockey for position, studly boy meets gorgeous girl. Monster-hunters are famous for having trust issues, but clearly these are drawn to each other in the time-honored Hollywood fashion. Shaw saves Reggie’s life. She returns the favor. The attraction deepens and heats up to the point where team-members on both sides grow unsettled by the loss of focus, singularly inopportune since, as monsters go, Waller rises to the second coming of Caligula—ample testimony furnished by a six-page, unsparingly detailed torture scene. In the end, the stalkers strike, bullets fly, screams curdle the blood, love has its innings and a monster does what a monster’s got to do.
The characters are paper thin, the plot twists mostly telegraphed, but the betting here is that the Baldacci army will once again show the stuff it’s made of.Pub Date: April 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56408-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avon A/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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After a flight in fantasy with When the Wind Blows (1998), Patterson goes to ground with another slash-and-squirm psychokiller page-turner, this one dedicated to “the millions of Alex Cross readers, who so frequently ask, can’t you write faster?” By day, Geoffrey Shafer is a charming, 42-year-old British Embassy paper-pusher with a picture-perfect family and a shady past as an MI-6 secret agent. Come sundown, he swallows a pharmacy of psychoactive pills, gulps three black coffees loaded with sugar, and roams the streets of Washington, D.C., in a battered cab, where, disguised as a black man, he rolls dice to determine which among his black female fares he—ll murder. Afterwards he dumps his naked victims in crime-infested back alleys of black- slum neighborhoods, then sends e-mails boasting of his accomplishments to three other former MI-6 agents involved in a hellish Internet role-playing game. “I sensed I was at the start of another homicide mess,” sighs forensic-psychologist turned homicide-detective Alex Cross. Cross yearns to catch the “Jane Doe murderer” but is thwarted by Det. Chief George Pittman, who assigns sexy Det. Patsy Hampton to investigate Cross and come up with a reason for dismissing him. Meanwhile, Cross’s fiancÇe is kidnaped during a Bermuda vacation, and an anonymous e-mail warns him to back off. He doesn’t, of course, and just when it appears that Patterson is sleep-walking through his story, Cross nabs Shafer minutes after Shafer kills Det. Hampton. During the subsequent high-visibility trail, Shafer manages to make the jury believe that he’s innocent and that Cross was trying to frame him. When all seems lost, a sympathetic British intelligence chief offers to help Cross bring down Shafer, and the other homicidal game-players, during a showdown on the breezy beaches of Jamaica. Kinky mayhem, a cartoonish villain, regular glimpses of the kindly Cross caring for his loved ones, and an ending that spells a sequel: Patterson’s fans couldn’t ask for more.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-69328-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | THRILLER
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