Greenlaw’s (Lifesaving Lessons, 2013, etc.) experience as a Maine-based lobster-boat captain brings verisimilitude to her...
A Miami cop finds life very different when she moves to Maine, from the weather to the stubbornly independent people of Green Haven.
Jane Bunker, insurance investigator and part-time deputy sheriff, was born on Acadia Island, but her mother left with her and her brother, Wally, who has Down syndrome, when they were very young. She knows the Bunker family only from her mother’s unflattering stories and so far has not worked up the courage to look into the past. When her boss asks her to investigate a house fire on Acadia, she gets her buddy Cal to take her across and goes to the home of the caretakers, Joan and Clark Proctor, and their daughter, Trudy, a mouthy law student who’s been picketing the island lobster factory and, as Jane later learns, sending threatening emails to Midge Kohl. Acadia has been far from peaceful ever since Midge and her husband gathered a group of investors to build a factory to process lobster. Finding too few locals to staff the place, the Kohls imported a group of ex-cons, driving down property values and scaring off residents. Their house fire at first seems accidental, but when Jane stumbles upon the body of the unpopular Midge and the autopsy reveals that she was murdered, the sheriff hands her the case. On the mainland, she arrests two men carrying a box of powder she thinks is probably drugs. She’s wrong—the substance is used to treat lobsters for transport—but the episode makes her wonder if drugs are involved in Midge’s murder, and she jumps to a few more conclusions that work out no better as she doggedly pursues a killer who may have her marked for murder.
Greenlaw’s (Lifesaving Lessons, 2013, etc.) experience as a Maine-based lobster-boat captain brings verisimilitude to her descriptions of the people, the landscape, and most of all the wild offshore weather, all neatly rolled into a mystery with plenty of suspects.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10756-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Catchy title; too bad the psychothriller behind it—despite the publisher's big push—is a mostly routine tale of cop vs. serial-killer. And it's really too bad for Patterson (The Midnight Club, 1988, etc.) that William Diehl's new thriller, Primal Fear (reviewed above), covers some of the same territory with superior energy and skill. A few charms lift this above run-of-the-mill: Patterson's hero, D.C. psychologist/cop Alex Cross, is black, while his lover, Secret Service honcho Jezzie Flanagan, is white; and the narrative moves briskly by cutting between Cross's ambling account and a sharper third-person tracking, mostly of the killer's movements. He is Gary Soneji—a nobody living a deceptively quiet life as Gary "Murphy"—who has killed 200 people and now wants to commit the Crime of the Century and become Somebody: Soneji/Murphy snatches the daughter of a top actress and the son of the US secretary of the treasury. Enter Cross and Flanagan, whose bad luck at finding kids and kidnapper—who, taunting the cops, kills an FBI agent and gets away with a $10-million payoff, while one of the kids turns up dead—changes only when Soneji/Murphy, cracking up, holds hostage to a McDonald's and is wounded by a cop. Here, Patterson's tale begins to mirror Diehl's: Soneji/Murphy turns out to suffer from the same sensational psychosis as Diehl's villain; and in the ensuing trial, Soneji/Murphy's lawyer pursues a defense similar to that of Diehl's attorney-hero. But where Diehl's villain roars on the page, Soneji/Murphy barely smirks; and while Diehl's courtroom crackles with intelligence, Patterson's is almost transcript-dull. Patterson does wind up, however, with a fine noir twist. Cross is a likable hero, but with a watery plot and weak villain—Hannibal Lecter would eat Soneji for breakfast—he doesn't have much to work with here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-69364-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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