by Louisa Luna ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 21, 2020
Luna’s latest entertains while subverting gender stereotypes and confronting the politics of immigration.
A former police officer and a for-profit vigilante reunite to fight crime and corruption on the southern border.
Divorced ex-cop Max “Cap” Caplan is on the verge of accepting a full-time PI position with a Denville, Pennsylvania, law firm when he receives an email from bounty hunter Alice Vega: She’ll pay him $10,000 if he’ll join her on a job in San Diego. Even though his last collaboration with Vega (Two Girls Down, 2018) imperiled both him and his teenage daughter, Nell, Cap drops everything and hops a plane to California, where he learns that he and Vega will be working as off-book consultants for the Drug Enforcement Administration with assistance from the San Diego Police Department. Both agencies suspect that two murdered Jane Does—young Latinas with almost sequentially numbered IUDs—were being trafficked for prostitution but are too busy dealing with Mexican drug tunnels to investigate. Despite having received pledges of full support, Vega senses their employers are hiding something, and her suspicion is confirmed when the pair uncovers a lead and gets kicked off the case. Undeterred, Cap and Vega redouble their efforts to find any remaining women and bring everyone involved to justice, consequences be damned. Luna delivers nearly 200 pages of by-the-numbers mystery before launching headlong into an intricately plotted, adrenaline-fueled conspiracy thriller. The stakes escalate as the odds against Cap and Vega mount, ratcheting up tension and intensifying drive while developing the characters. In contrast with her debut, Luna this time develops the burgeoning attraction between empathetic Cap and Jack Reacher–esque Vega, resulting in a series duo with legs.
Luna’s latest entertains while subverting gender stereotypes and confronting the politics of immigration.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54551-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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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New York Times Bestseller
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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