A mistake, painfully short on the author’s trademark humor. Return, Mark Beamon.
Mills sets aside Mark Beamon, the exiled FBI profiler of his first three novels (Free Fall, 2000, etc.), for fledgling Bureau researcher Quinn Barry.
Too bad she’s not a more compelling heroine, however, because the author delays until mid-novel before revealing his serial-killer villain, Dr. Edward Marin, a Hannibal Lecter rip-off and suavely sybaritic supergenius (winner of the Nobel Prize for a scientific paper so original that it had no footnotes) with superhuman strength. Marin’s great joy lies in tying down sophisticated young women, making small cuts all over their bodies with an X-Acto knife, then raping them while they bleed. The “burn factor” refers to a squad that the baddies send around to clean up after Marin’s murders because he’s their indispensable theorist for a Star Wars laser weapon. While testing and cleaning up the FBI’s new CODIS database for collecting DNA from crimes nationwide, Barry finds that identical DNA evidence links five similar murders. Her boss says she’s in error and quickly transfers her to Quantico, the FBI training school, for scut work. Barry, a keen profiler but no Clarice Starling, has a crush on becoming a full-fledged FBI agent, but she knows her research is being quashed. When she gets a hair from another supergenius, Eric Twain, she proves that he was viciously accused of one murder. As Twain and Barry team up to uncover the identity of the true killer, we wonder only when the monster will bequeath to Barry his smiling Hannibalisms from a serene mountaintop of superior wisdom. Mills drives his novel straight into a brick wall painted with Anthony Hopkins’s face; nor can he equal the gothic glamour of Mark Harris’s richly gross situations.
A mistake, painfully short on the author’s trademark humor. Return, Mark Beamon.Pub Date: April 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019334-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Too much psychobabble, technobabble, and envirobabble, yet the appeal of the young sleuths (smart, funny, tough) almost...
A cunning serial killer plays devilish mind games with his would-be captors—and what else is new?
Not much. Well, he does have this penchant for pluralizing. That is, he grabs his young women in pairs. Why pairs? He uses corpse one for the planting of clues sufficient to allow law enforcement—if law enforcement is astute enough—to find corpse two alive. “Eco-Killer,” he’s been tabbed because in addition to his passion for gamesmanship, he seems to have an ongoing love-hate relationship with the environment. From Georgia, scene of the first killings, we shift to Virginia, where Special Agent Mac McCormack of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been on the case from the outset. He’s been directed to Virginia by a barrage of enigmatic phone calls from someone who claims to know how the serial killer’s sly and twisted mind works. In Quantico, a training ground for FBI agents as well as for US Marines, Mac meets fledgling feebie Kimberly Quincy, daughter of former agent Pierce Quincy, famous throughout the service for his legendary exploits as a profiler. When the Eco-Killer strikes again, Quincy and his p.i. partner Lorraine Conner, mainstays of the series, (The Next Accident, 2001, etc.), are called in to consult, but the case really belongs to the captivating Kimberly and hunkish Mac (with their bods for sex and brains for high-powered detecting). Convinced there’s a chance to save a life if they can manage to solve the killer’s puzzle in time, the two desperately seek clues from botanists, biologists, entomologists, and a variety of other analysts. Something from here, something from there, and at last they can make the guess that plunges them deep into Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, where the game plays out to a fiery end.
Too much psychobabble, technobabble, and envirobabble, yet the appeal of the young sleuths (smart, funny, tough) almost saves the day.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80252-6
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
A treasure trove of Victoriana, especially for foodies. More history than mystery but a truly delightful read.
A split-second decision is life-changing in this stand-alone Victorian-era mystery from Bowen (Love and Death Among the Cheetahs, 2019, etc.).
Isabella Waverly’s father is an aristocrat estranged from his family who’s fallen so far in the world that he sent his oldest daughter out to work as a servant at 15. Her only joy is learning to cook. When a girl is run over by an omnibus before her eyes, Bella automatically picks up an envelope the dead girl had been clutching. The envelope contains an invitation to apply for an under-cook position at Buckingham Palace that very day. Introducing herself as Helen Barton, Bella snags the job. She hides her new position from Louisa, the younger sister who’s marrying the son of a well-off family. She struggles to immerse herself in the persona of a girl from Yorkshire, explaining her upper-class accent by saying her father was a gentleman. The only fly in the ointment is the appearance of Helen’s brother, who blackmails her into finding a job for him, too. Bella’s passion for cooking and her work ethic soon endear her to the mostly male staff. Queen Victoria, who has an enormous appetite for rich foods, so enjoys Bella’s scones that she personally asks her to make them every day. When her majesty travels to Nice, Bella goes along and gets to put her knowledge of French to use. She develops a semiromantic friendship with the head chef at the hotel, which was built especially for the queen. Indeed, her life seems idyllic until Count Wilhelm, the betrothed of Princess Sophie, dies, ostensibly from a poisoned mushroom Bella bought in a local market. Now she must juggle cooking and a suddenly active love life as she searches for a way to end her predicament.
A treasure trove of Victoriana, especially for foodies. More history than mystery but a truly delightful read.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0825-9
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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