Welcome back to Clarkland, where the menace to young womanhood is piled on as thick as whipped cream, and where, this time, a TV reporter's investigation of a nefarious fertility clinic—and of her own family—is provoked by the street murder of a woman who looks like her identical twin. Meghan Collins's routine story on the Manning Clinic's in-vitro fertilization program turns nightmarish when clinic embryologist Helene Petrovic is shot dead—and then turns out to be not a doctor after all, but a cosmetologist (!) who may have mislabeled dozens of fertilized embryos that have now been implanted in mothers who think they're about to have their own biological children. Meanwhile, that unidentified body, who sure does look like Meghan, turns out to be her half-sister, and the suspected killer none other than Meghan's father Edwin, missing and presumed dead since his car supposedly plunged over the side of the Tappan Zee Bridge nine months ago. Worse, the police have linked Edwin to the Petrovic killing too, since his headhunting agency recommended Petrovic to the Manning Clinic. As Meghan uses her enforced time off from the Manning Clinic story to track down the second family Edwin kept in Arizona—and, she hopes, to establish his death and clear his name despite repeated indications that he's still alive—she's threatened by the likes of (1) Victor Orsini, the headhunting-agency associate who took a phone call from Edwin moments before the bridge accident; (2) Dr. Henry Williams, a fertility specialist who knows where Petrovic got the unexpectedly big estate she's left to the Manning Clinic, and what's become of her inconvenient Rumanian niece; and—just for good measure—(3) generic loony Bernie Heffernan, who's obsessed with following Meghan and videotaping her. Clark's customary mastery of pace slackens as she marks time, especially during Act Three, while you wait hopefully for all these plots to come together. They don't. But nobody will care. (Literary Guild Triple Selection for July)
Pub Date: May 5, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-67366-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK TO SCREEN
TV Series Based on I’ll Be Seeing You in Works
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.
A good Samaritan incurs a psychopath’s wrath in this debut thriller.
Veterinarian Cassie Larkin is heading home after a 12-hour shift when someone darts in front of her car, causing her to dump her energy drink. As she pulls over to mop up the mess, her headlights illuminate a couple having a physical altercation. Cassie calls 911, but before help arrives, the man tosses the woman down an embankment. Ignoring the dispatcher’s instructions, Cassie exits the vehicle and intervenes, preventing the now-unconscious woman’s murder. With sirens wailing in the distance, the man warns Cassie: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.” He then scrambles back to the road and flees in Cassie’s van. Using mug shots, Cassie identifies the thief and would-be killer as Carver Sweet, who is wanted for poisoning his wife. The Santa Rosa police assure Cassie of her safety, but the next evening, her husband, Sam, vanishes while trick-or-treating with their 6-year-old daughter, Audrey. Hours later, he sends texts apologizing and confessing to an affair, but although it’s true that Sam and Cassie have been fighting, she suspects foul play—particularly given the previous night’s events. Cassie files a report with the cops, but they dismiss her concerns, leaving Cassie to investigate on her own. After a convoluted start, Chavez embarks on a paranoia-fueled thrill ride, escalating the stakes while exploiting readers’ darkest domestic fears. The far-fetched plot lacks cohesion and relies too heavily on coincidence to be fully satisfying, but the reader will be invested in learning the Larkin family’s fate through to the too-pat conclusion.
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293617-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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