by Kris Nelscott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2004
Apart from the strong continuing characters, the compelling treatment here of the pre–Roe v. Wade era—furtive and often...
The closest you’ll ever come to understanding life as a black man in the ’60s, even if you’re a black man who lived through them.
Private eye Smokey Dalton and the street kid who could identify the real assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., assuming identities as father-and-son Bill and Jimmy Grimshaw, have settled in a Chicago apartment next door to Marvella Walker, a stunning black woman. One night, while Jimmy’s staying with friends, Smokey and his rich, white do-gooder girlfriend Laura Hathaway (Thin Walls, 2002, etc.) hear moans from Marvella’s place. It’s Val, the ex-wife of Marvella’s cousin Truman, a cop still obsessed with her. A rape victim, Val turned to Marvella when an abortionist nearly killed her. Truman’s plan to get revenge ends with his murder by two teenage gang members. Smelling a setup, Smokey takes up the case, though he’s stymied by the sheer number of underground abortionists and by a cover-up mounted by the Chicago PD Gang Intelligence Unit. The denouement finds Smokey side by side with the Blackstone Rangers, a fearsome street gang, as they mow down the man behind Val’s rape and Truman’s murder.
Apart from the strong continuing characters, the compelling treatment here of the pre–Roe v. Wade era—furtive and often grisly abortions, frequent “treatment” of black women by sterilization, along with the general ignorance among most men of what was going on—take this crackerjack series to new heights.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28784-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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