by Lotte Hammer & Søren Hammer ; translated by Charlotte Barslund ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2017
The Hammers, who put the procedure in procedural, keep the pot simmering at such a low temperature you’ll wonder if they’ve...
The fourth of the Hammer siblings’ accounts of Danish skulduggery follows a human trafficking ring to its untidy but logical end.
Identifying the skeletal remains of a young woman killed six months ago, her body dumped in a lake in Hanehoved Forest, is obviously going to be quite a challenge for Detective Superintendent Konrad "Simon" Simonsen (The Vanished, 2016, etc.) and his colleagues in the Copenhagen Homicide Department. It will take months before their painstaking, brick-by-brick investigation reveals what the reader has known all along: the dead woman, an uncooperative Nigerian teenager who’d been smuggled into Denmark and forced into prostitution, was accidentally killed in the middle of a punishment administered by Henrik Krag, a newcomer to this kind of work, while his more experienced partner, Jan Podowski, and Benedikte Lerche-Larsen, the boss’s daughter, looked on. Simon and his crew deferentially interview Adam Blixen-Agerskjold, the chamberlain and gentleman farmer who owns the forest, and his lady, Lenette, before they develop a more serious interest in estate bailiff Frode Otto, whose four-year-old conviction for assault makes him a much more likely prospect. And indeed Otto, questioned by the police, smilingly confesses to three additional rapes on which the statute of limitations has run out. While Simon and company are running down unpromising leads, the tale keeps turning to Benedikte’s hate/hate relationship with her father, poker and prostitution king Svend Lerche, and his helpmeet, Karina Larsen—who want to keep their daughter on a short leash even as they groom her to take over the family business—and her unlikely romance with Henrik Krag, which promises to be equally dysfunctional.
The Hammers, who put the procedure in procedural, keep the pot simmering at such a low temperature you’ll wonder if they’ve mistaken the fridge for the stovetop. The stubborn lack of momentum makes this one a natural for travelers on endless flights.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-749-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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by Lotte Hammer & Søren Hammer ; translated by Charlotte Barslund
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by Lotte Hammer & Søren Hammer ; translated by Paul Norlen
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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