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SKY WOMAN FALLING

An awful lot of crucial information depends on hypnosis and Turnipseed’s dreams. In addition, there’s numbing aeronautic...

Native American myth, Oneida land claims, and psychosis complicate the latest case of Indian Affairs specialists Emmett Parker and Anna Turnipseed (Ancient Ones, 2001, etc.).

How could Brenda Two Kettles have been thrown off Adirondack flight 557 en route to New York from Syracuse without anyone noticing? Is it possible she wasn’t on the plane but was tossed through a hole in the ether, like the Sky Woman of myth? Maybe, but FBI agents Parker (Comanche) and Turnipseed (Modoc) also zero in on Garrity, a plane mechanic and member of the Upstate Minutemen, who violently resented the land claims that would entitle the Oneida to billions in reparations. Christopher White Pine, an author, therapist, and special assistant to the Oneida Nations representative, has his own ideas, and so do the higher-ups at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau, the local cops, airlines security and maintenance personnel, Two Kettles’s relatives, and even Johnny T. Skyholder, the slow-witted, behemoth handyman at the Cultural Center. Several more bodies crash to earth; planes almost taxi into Parker; and an axe-wielding baddie lays him low. Turnipseed drives all over the ice-and-snow landscape in pursuit of divers suspects, ultimately falling through the air herself when a killer tries to turn her into Sky Woman.

An awful lot of crucial information depends on hypnosis and Turnipseed’s dreams. In addition, there’s numbing aeronautic detail, some grisly death sequences, and a rather touching ending to the Parker-Turnipseed romance.

Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003

ISBN: 0-425-19191-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003

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MYSTIC RIVER

An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...

After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.

Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.

An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.

Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001

ISBN: 0-688-16316-5

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000

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AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939

ISBN: 0062073478

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Dodd, Mead

Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939

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