Even fans who can’t appreciate the passing strangeness of this truly special adventure will be won over by a precocious...
Supt. Richard Jury’s 20th case begins as the shaggiest of shaggy-dog stories, moves through a critique of quantum mechanics and ends in a truly mystical realm.
In a London pub, a stranger named Harry Johnson tells Jury (The Grave Maurice, 2002, etc.) a story that isn’t really a story. Nine months ago, physics professor Hugh Gault lost his whole family when all three of its members—his wife Glynnis, their autistic son Robbie and their dog Mungo—vanished during the middle of a house-hunting trip to Surrey. Though Hugh hired detectives, there was no sign of any of them—until recently, when Mungo suddenly popped up. The story, as Harry points out, isn’t complete because the riddle lacks an ending or an explanation, and Jury, his curiosity piqued to the point of obsession by the clues Harry teasingly doles out, can’t supply them. Neither can his aristocratic friend Melrose Plant or the rest of his whimsical hangers-on, though they duly ponder the puzzle—Melrose even goes as far as taking a trip to Tuscany to meet the owner of one of the houses Glynnis was to visit—and ask questions. The answers, when they finally come, have less to do with the wheels of justice than with superstrings, Gödel’s incompleteness theory and Schrödinger’s cat.
Even fans who can’t appreciate the passing strangeness of this truly special adventure will be won over by a precocious little girl and a dog of rare intelligence.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03479-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
Dozens of twists and a couple of first-class shocks, but it all trails off like an endless fireworks display that keeps...
Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist who recently knocked 'em dead at the bijou (The Bone Collector, 1997), is back, sweating to rescue a pair of kidnapped Tarheelers from the insect-loving kid who's snatched them.
Lured to North Carolina by the promise of some experimental surgery that might allow him to move more than his head and a single finger, Rhyme is on hand, along with his protégé Amelia Sachs, when Sheriff Jim Bell gets the news that Garrett Hanlon, the troubled teenager who already killed fellow-student Billy Stail and dragged Mary Beth McConnell off to the back of beyond, has returned to abduct nurse Lydia Johansson as well. Analyzing the scanty trace evidence with all his usual rigor, Rhyme, using Sachs as his eyes and nose at the crime scene, dopes out where the Insect Boy must be taking his victims, and Sachs, joined by Bell's deputies, races a trio of moronic moonshiners bent on a reward Mary Beth's mother has offered to catch up with Hanlon first. The case would be closed if this were anybody but devious Deaver. But the arrest is only his cue to turn up the heat, as Rhyme and Sachs duke it out over Hanlon's guilt, and their conflict leaves Sachs on the run with Hanlon in custody, or vice versa. As former allies turn against each other, Deaver shows loyalties dissolving and reforming in record time. But the effect of this double-time quadrille is more ingenious than illuminating; Rhyme's forensic work is more dogged than gripping; and the galaxy of junior-league threats who take the place of Deaver's usual sociopathic monsters (The Devil's Teardrop, 1999, etc.) are no more threatening than a cloud of pesky mosquitoes.
Dozens of twists and a couple of first-class shocks, but it all trails off like an endless fireworks display that keeps exploding into bangs and blossoms even after you've started to look for your car. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild Main Selection.)Pub Date: May 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85563-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
Hollywood homicide dick Harry Bosch goes up against whoever killed high-rolling, lowlife filmmaker Tony Aliso and tipped his body into the trunk of his Rolls. The early buzz on the case shouts Las Vegas—so Harry heads out there in hopes of tracking down Tony's latest companion, a stripper named Layla. Instead he finds a trail of evidence that links Tony to a money-laundering operation for Joey Marks, the outfit's top man in Vegas; to Dolly's, a strip club owned by Marks lieutenant Luke ("Lucky") Goshen; and to Eleanor Wish, an ex-FBI agent whose activities took her to Harry's bed and a stretch in the pen before she turned up on video playing poker at Tony's side. Tough-guy Harry (The Last Coyote, 1995, etc.), incredibly still carrying a torch for Eleanor, wastes no time rekindling their affair—Eleanor's sullenness cracks just long enough for some brisk sex—and then finds he has to cut all sorts of deals with the Vegas cops and his own department to keep her out of the case he's building against Lucky Goshen. Back in L.A., deeper trouble awaits: When Harry lays out the case against Goshen—motive, fingerprints, murder weapon—he's told that Goshen's an undercover FBI agent with an ironclad alibi and that he's dashed into the middle of a sting that's been years in the making. Relieved once again of his homicide assignment, Harry—together with trusty sidekicks Jerry Edgar and Kiz Rider—goes up against Tony's killers himself, with results as gripping and satisfying as they are improbable. Forget realism, okay? If you'd like to see a buried love affair take off like a rocket and a bunch of crooks and crooked cops as canny and treacherous as le Carres spies, you've come to the right place.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-15244-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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