Throughout it all, Macdonald struggles admirably but not always successfully to bridge the gap between the cozy circle of...
The Christmas rush must wait while antiquarian bookseller Dido Hoare (Die Once, 2003, etc.) is caught between a dismembered corpse and the London police.
Harry Lewis may be only a street person, but sightings of him are never without interest. When Dido’s young son Ben first spots him one evening, his attention is drawn to Harry’s monkey. When Harry follows Dido into her bookshop, he produces a copy of James Andrews’s Victorian Lessons in Flower Painting, whose hand-colored illustrations provoke Dido to offer Harry a fast £500, which he declines without comment. Most interesting of all is a discovery Harry makes in a nearby dustbin before vanishing: the torso and left arm of an unidentified female. Detective Sergeant Laura Smiley has no idea who the dead woman could be, and Police Constable Ken Acker seems to be too busy beating his wife, an old customer of Dido’s, to take much interest. So Dido teams up with her friend, crime reporter Chris Kennedy, and her father, retired Oxford professor Barnabas Hoare, to trace the remains. Their investigation brings them up against several unsavory characters, from retired prostitute Annie Kelly to drug seller Georgie McIntyre, before a muffled conclusion arrives just in time for Christmas.
Throughout it all, Macdonald struggles admirably but not always successfully to bridge the gap between the cozy circle of Dido’s extended family, notable for the warmth between her and her father, and the sordid crimes she’s stumbled onto this time.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7278-6218-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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