Haste Ye Back, Manda Scott.
Among the many fine thrillers played out against the rugged Scottish Highlands, No Good Deed scores as one of the best.
Nine-year-old Jamie Buchanan watches in silent horror as a sting in a Glasgow tenement veers out of control. Across the room Sandra Smith fires away at three men who would kill her and the boy. The boy’s mother, a prostitute, lies dead, as does Sandra’s lover Luke. But minus a tart’s wig and makeup, Sandra is actually Orla McLeod working undercover with Murdo Cameron to trap Tord Svensen, a Bill Sykes for the new millennium. The reasons why Cameron and McLeod want Svensen, and the nature of their undercover work in Scotland, emerge only gradually in the cannily plotted tale. (Scott follows the Hitchcock rule of suspense: reveal the villain at once, his motives at last.) Their cover blown in the botched operation, Cameron, McLeod, and the boy head north by northwest for the snowy Highlands, which Scott renders in keen, lovely detail. On the coast, they shelter with Orla’s mother, who bears her own brutal past: the civil strife in Ireland took the lives of her husband and son, destroyed her career, and left her and Orla physically scarred. Relaxing the pace during this Highland idyll, Scott deepens characterizations. Orla contemplates her double nature, one half-warm by the cottage hearth, the other half-desperate to wrap the case in Glasgow, even if it means going there without cover. Orla, of course, gives in to the latter. Perhaps predictably, while she’s away, the child is kidnapped at gunpoint. Then, back on the site of the sting, Orla confronts a series of reversals as tricky and deadly as a North Sea gale. An epilogue finds Orla, Murdo, and the boy warmly united, the tale’s underlying moral and political issues perhaps forever unsettled.
Haste Ye Back, Manda Scott.Pub Date: April 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-553-80267-4
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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