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IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

The plucky mother of a kidnapped child and a jaded ex-cop join forces to snare a sadistic child killer, in this latest by true- crime writer (Esther, 1994) and historical novelist (Star of Empire, 1992) Sanders. Widowed Manhattanite Rachel Shelby is driving her two children across country when her car is blindsided in a small Oklahoma town. She wakes up in the hospital to discover that her daughter is missing. It seems that Suzanne, a pint-sized 11-year-old and star of a hit movie, disappeared in the chaos surrounding the fiery wreck. Frustrated with the local cops, Rachel hires Booker Reeves, a retired detective, to help find her daughter. Booker's research quickly uncovers a number of cases that seem related—young girls who have been snatched in broad daylight in the region. Several bodies have been discovered: One had an odd bite mark, another was covered in something like saliva. And many more were never found. Cut to Suzanne in her abductor's barn, next to a caged 32-foot python. (Guess where those missing bodies went.) It appears that the snake man, a heroin addict, is aroused by others' fear. Dr. Patricia McMahon, a forensic psychiatrist, is brought into the investigation: She and Booker concoct the scheme of advertising a reward for information on billboards. Rachel mans the phones and establishes contact with the snake man, who indeed takes the bait. Too wily to think that he could get away with the money, he shoots his way into Rachel's hotel room, hoping to find it there. But the money is in a local bank. He kidnaps Rachel and brings her back to the barn for a complicated climatic showdown. Booker, meanwhile, is working the snake angle (thanks to the bite on that earlier victim), but will he show up in time to save Rachel? A grisly but well-oiled page turner, marred by an over-the-top ending.

Pub Date: July 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-7867-0306-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996

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THE A LIST

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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BOOK OF THE DEAD

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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