Familiar territory, yet engaging and satisfying: a good one for a rainy evening.
Just about everything that didn’t work in Sullivan’s Labyrinth (2002) clicks here. Pace, plotting, description, and characterization are spot on.
This time, a San Diego police detective tracks a serial killer whose weapons of choice are deadly reptiles. Sullivan starts with cop Seamus Moynihan, “Shay” to friends and family, puzzling over several gruesome murders that share these circumstances: the victims, all men, are found bound and naked, apples stuffed in their mouths, bitten to death by snakes. Condoms and semen stains on the beds suggest sex was part of a deadly mix that may have involved three participants and a deadly African snake. Verses, some from the Bible, are scrawled on the walls at the crime scenes. Shay’s investigation leads him to a nasty, homophobic hip-hopper; a celebrity snake-handler at the San Diego Zoo and his assistant; and Susan Dahony, assistant professor of religious studies at San Diego University. Dahony suggests the case may center on the biblical mystery of Cain’s wife and the myth of Lilith. The trail eventually winds, as it were, to the very creepy Hattiesburgh, Alabama, where Shay confronts a snake-worshiping Holiness sect. Sullivan wisely resists overdoing the violence; basic details are gruesome enough in and of themselves. He also blends in just enough sharp character background to add texture, particularly with Shay, haunted by a divorce, by a troubled relationship with his ten-year-old son, and by his father’s murder. The latter trauma affords Shay an unsettling empathy with his quarry, whose identity is revealed in a spooky climax as Shay is stripped, tied down, and tortured by a serpent’s “kisses.” Cop outwits captor, but a final coda suggests they may return for a sequel or even a series.
Familiar territory, yet engaging and satisfying: a good one for a rainy evening.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-3982-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
The fairy-tale ending calls for some convenient coincidences and changes of heart, but Scottoline’s legion of fans will be...
A Connecticut teacher’s long-sought and hard-fought pregnancy turns into a nightmare when Scottoline (Corrupted, 2015, etc.) unleashes one of her irresistible hooks on her.
Forced to extreme measures because her dreamy husband, Marcus, is sterile, Christine Nilsson has finally gotten pregnant using sperm from anonymous Donor 3319. At the party the staff at Nutmeg Hill Elementary have thrown to celebrate her departure, she gets a look at a serial killer doing his perp walk on TV, and he’s the spitting image of Donor 3319. When the Homestead Bank refuses to confirm or deny the identity of the donor, Christine and Marcus react in dramatically different ways. Marcus is determined to sue Homestead and whomever else is necessary to find out once and for all whether the father of the child he’s awaited so long has killed at least three nurses from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Christine persuades her best friend, Lauren Weingarten, to accompany her to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Zachary Jeffcoat has been incarcerated, to ask him whether he’s Donor 3319. But Zachary is considerably shrewder and more manipulative than Christine, and before she knows it, she’s helping him instead of vice versa, finding him a raffish lawyer, volunteering to work as an unpaid paralegal to help with his defense, and interviewing the latest victim’s neighbors. As usual, the complications aren’t quite up to the level of the startling hook, and Christine needs more than a bit of luck to dig up the information she seeks. Along the way, she finds out a good many other things she definitely wasn’t looking for.
The fairy-tale ending calls for some convenient coincidences and changes of heart, but Scottoline’s legion of fans will be too relieved to object.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-01013-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the...
A sociopath targets a suburban Pennsylvania psychiatrist whose success is only the prelude to a series of nightmarish reversals.
It’s true that Dr. Eric Parrish doesn’t have everything. His wife, Caitlin, is divorcing him and being difficult over the joint custody they’ve arranged for their 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, and his latest private patient, 17-year-old Max Jakubowski, seems much more in need of help than his dying grandmother does. But Eric’s colleagues like and admire him—one of them, medical student Kristine Malin, is clearly in hot pursuit—and so does U.S. News and World Report, which is about to announce that the psych unit Eric heads at Havemeyer General Hospital ranks second in the nation. It all goes south with a suddenness that would be shocking outside the pages of Scottoline. Kristine files harassment charges after Eric rejects her come-on. Max phones Eric to say that his grandmother’s died and then takes a powder. Renée Bevilacqua, a girl Max tutors in math and otherwise worships from afar, gets murdered the morning after Eric follows her home, looking in vain for a lead to Max’s whereabouts. The cops haul Eric in as a person of interest, then invade his office and home looking for evidence when he demands they find Max, whom he considers a suicide risk, but won’t say any more about him. The colleagues who so recently toasted Eric lock him out. And that’s all before Max takes five teenagers hostage and announces that he’s going to kill one every 15 minutes before he blows up the King of Prussia Mall. Who can possibly be pulling so many different strings?
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the wall for a troubled teen as she ever was with Bennie Rosato’s all-female law practice (Betrayed, 2014, etc.).Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01011-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
