Van Wormer plots with consummate skill, but her talky style lacks flavor, her knowing asides lack wit. Still: a carefully...
Bookbiz babe and sometime sleuth Sally Harrington (Expose, 1999, etc.) returns, with a cool new gig at a TV news program in Connecticut—and a hot new love.
Networking for all he’s worth, Spencer Hawes, an executive editor at Bennet, Fitzallen & Coe, Sally's former employer in New York, escorts her to a swanky Hollywood party to celebrate a studio head’s ghostwritten memoir. There, she meets Lilliana Martin, an enigmatic blond beauty on the verge of stardom, and proposes an interview. The bisexual Lilliana counters with a proposition of her own: a threesome. Sally angrily refuses, accusing the protesting Spencer of setting her up, and storms off back to New York. After a passionate night of kiss-and-make-up sex with Spencer, he disappears . . . and Sally is appalled to find out that copies of a videotape featuring steamy highlights of their tryst have been sent to everyone she knows. Who taped her? Why? And where is Spencer? Sally suspects that Lilliana may know, especially when the actress’s boyfriend comes looking for her—and is then found dead, shot mob-style twice in the head. Tracking down Lilliana, she uncovers a war between mob factions over a lucrative West Coast protection racket for movie-union biggies. Looks like the people she most wants to talk to have vanished into the federal witness-protection program under new identities. And who could be better at assuming a new identity than an actress? Spencer explains all when he finally resurfaces, after being beaten to a pulp and sent out to sea on a garbage barge. Sadder but wiser, Sally forgives him—and does her best to forget him.
Van Wormer plots with consummate skill, but her talky style lacks flavor, her knowing asides lack wit. Still: a carefully crafted mystery with a likable heroine worth a place in the increasingly crowded Connecticut suburbs.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55166-590-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Sandford's sixth thriller—including two under his real name of John Camp—since July 1989. It's no surprise, then, that this fourth in his bestselling Prey series shows some stretch and strain, bringing cop-hero Lucas Davenport away from Minneapolis to Manhattan to tangle again with the homicidal maniac of Eyes of Prey (1991). But it's not just drug-crazed pathologist Michael Bekker—infamous for cutting out his victims' eyelids as he torture-kills them to capture the moment of transition from life to death—that tests Davenport here. Weeks after Bekker escapes from a Minneapolis courthouse in the novel's fierce kickoff, Davenport is visited by old flame Lily Rothenberg of the NYPD (Rules of Prey). Not only is Bekker running amok in N.Y.C., Lily says, but so is a cabal of vigilante cops who've killed perhaps dozens of the Big Apple's most vicious worms. Will Davenport help snare Bekker and at the same time secretly sniff out the bad cops? Davenport's exploration of Gotham's mean streets dramatically points up the metropolis as an inferno of the damned—dealers, fences, junkies—as seen by a small-city cop; but Davenport himself seems less the appealingly brooding, game-playing genius of previous novels than a devious bully with a penchant for extralegal tactics, including intimidation and burglary. Meanwhile, Bekker pops pills and reaps victims under Davenport's nose until a major twist reveals why the killer remains invisible. As Davenport closes in, he also finds himself looking hard at friends old and new as possible vigilantes: Lily, her cop-lover, another top cop, and Davenport's own new bedmate, a feisty "cowgirl" cop named Barb Fell. The two cases close out in predictable but tense climaxes fraught with poetic justice. Solid cop-action with well-drawn minor characters, but lacking the high cleverness or suspense of some earlier Preys. And recycled villain Bekker is no Hannibal Lecter.
Pub Date: March 30, 1992
ISBN: 0425224465
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.
On his way to the West Coast, Jack Reacher takes a detour to New Hampshire to check out some family history in the 23rd book in Child's (The Midnight Line, 2017, etc.) series.
Laconia, New Hampshire, is the setting for the latest showcase for Reacher's unconscious talent for stirring up the latent murderous violence in any bucolic setting he chooses to enter. In this case, the hubbub comes in the form of a local mob family after Reacher unleashes his own form of discipline on a younger member of the clan when the beardless thug attempts to assault a waitress. Paid muscle is soon on the way north from Boston, but both Reacher and his constant readers know that kind of goon is never a match for him. And so Reacher and reader are free to ponder the puzzling story about our hero's past. It seems that there is no official record of Reacher's dad, who grew up in Laconia, but there is evidence to suggest he may have played a hand in the murder of a sociopath terrorizing the town in his day. All of this is intercut with the ordeal of a young Canadian couple driving south to New York to score some money by selling the goods they've got hidden away in a suitcase. Their car breaks down just outside a remote motel that, they gradually discover, is not as welcoming as it seems. It doesn't take long to figure out what's waiting for them there, though it takes a bit too long for Reacher's story to join theirs. Nevertheless, the tone doesn't go blooey here, as it has in some of the recent series entries, and the way everything winds up for all the participants shows a satisfying generosity of storytelling spirit.
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59351-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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