Detective Gabriel McCray, the prime suspect in the Malibu Canyon serial killings, grapples with the ghosts of his tormented past in Stevens’ (Follow Your Dreams, 2009, etc.) dark murder mystery.
Set in the Santa Monica Mountains, the novel begins with the termination of Det. Gabriel McCray, who is serving a suspension for police brutality. Meanwhile, the Malibu Canyon murderer lures unsuspecting victims into the mountains, carving them up with an old Army knife before engulfing them in flames. When the serial murderer leaves a peculiar message lodged in a gaping hole in a victim’s chest, three things become apparent—the perpetrator knows Gabriel, he or she is intent on revisiting his past and the Los Angeles Police Department cannot solve the case without reinstating him. With Gabriel back on the case, Stevens sets the stage for graphic sensory details and a fast-paced, tantalizing mystery that utilizes her passion and research in forensics and psychology. From fingers still displaying wedding bands to severed ears, the serial killer collects one gruesome souvenir after another in an attempt to achieve the seven chakras of power. As the plot unfolds, dialogue between Gabriel and his psychologist Dr. B produces revelations about “Gabe’s” childhood, and his suppressed memories are extracted through hypnosis. Stevens seamlessly integrates flashbacks of Gabriel’s life in San Francisco as a neglected child and his traumatic experiences with Andrew Pierce. Readers will relate to the San Francisco and Los Angeles settings, and Stevens’ allusions to “Cask of Amontillado” and Frankenstein craft a story immersed in theater, disguise and secrecy. In the midst of the upheaval caused by the unsolved murders, the author provides Gabriel with a fascinating love interest, Ming—the chief medical examiner assigned to examine the victims’ bodies. Gabriel’s bouts of violent behavior and incessant blackouts at inopportune times leave him as the prime suspect and thrust him into a world of self doubt, old wounds and suppressed memories in which key clues are concealed. Memorable characters, macabre scenes and a dazzling portrayal of reality will leave readers anxious for book two in the Gabriel McCray series.
Pub Date: June 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456450113
Page Count: 372
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long...
Soldier-turned-soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher goes after a serial killer in a conventionally but nonetheless deeply satisfying whodunit.
In today's armed services, you lose even when you win—at least if you're a woman who files a sexual harassment complaint. Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke were both successful in their suits, which ended the careers of their alleged harassers. But Callan and Cooke ended up leaving the service themselves, and now they're both dead, murdered by a diabolical perp who keeps leaving behind the same crime scene—the victim's body submerged in a bathtub filled with camouflage paint—and not a single clue to the killer's identity or the cause of death. The FBI hauls in Reacher, who handled both women's complaints as an Army MP, as a prime suspect, then offers to upgrade him to a consulting investigator when their own surveillance gives him an alibi for a third killing. No thanks, says our hero, who's taken an instant dislike to FBI profiler Julia Lamarr, until the Feds' threats against his lawyer girlfriend Jodie Jacob (Tripwire, 1999) bring him into the fold. While Reacher is pretending to study lists of potential victims and suspects and fending off the government-sponsored advances of Quantico's comely Lisa Harper, the murderer is getting ready to pounce on a fourth victim: Lamarr's stepsister Alison. This latest coup does nothing to improve relations between Reacher and the Feebees, all of them determined to prove they're the toughest hombres in the parking lot, but it does set the stage for some honest sleuthing, some treacherous red herrings, and some convincing evidence for Reacher's assertion that all that profiling stuff is just plain common sense.
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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