by Laurien Berenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2001
Though Melanie neither identifies the forgettable killer nor even figures out why Aunt Peg is acting so suspiciously nice,...
The dust jacket says it all: a pair of dogs driving off in a car with a Just Married placard. Although the impending nuptials technically involve humans—Connecticut private-school tutor Melanie Travis’s brother Frank and his fiancée Alberta Kennedy—Melanie has much less to say about them than about her fearsome Aunt Peg, Bertie’s wedding planner Sara Bentley, or just about anybody else who has to do with showing dogs. But self-absorbed, irresponsible Sara, doing her best to provide dramatic competition for Melanie’s favorite species, disappears just when the wedding plans should be going into overdrive, and Melanie, enlisted as her aide in order to help her get over the departure of her lover Sam Driver (Unleashed, 2000), soon finds that Sara’s lack of experience as a wedding planner is balanced by lots of other experience she’s had, most of it unpleasant. When Sara’s New Canaan cottage burns down with a body inside, Melanie assumes the dead woman is Sara—until she finds out that Sara’s ordered flowers since her disappearance and phoned Bertie since the fire. What gives? Though Bertie offers to keep Melanie’s unwelcome ex-husband Bob—back in town bereft of his voting-age second wife—off Melanie’s back if she joins the investigation, veterans of Berenson’s first seven adventures won’t expect miracles of detection.
Though Melanie neither identifies the forgettable killer nor even figures out why Aunt Peg is acting so suspiciously nice, her Standard Poodle, Faith, takes Winners Bitch, Best of Breed, and Best of Opposite Sex.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57566-677-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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
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by J.A. Jance
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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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