Rest easy, Agatha: Clark (Daddy’s Gone A Hunting, 2013, etc.) can’t match your skill at spinning webs as logical as they are...
That up-to-the-minute phenomenon, reality TV, provides the basis for Clark’s most retro tale ever.
Coming off two failed projects, television producer Laurie Moran, widowed five years ago by a killer who told her 3-year-old son, “Timmy, tell your mother that she’s next. Then it’s your turn,” is hungry for a hit. She thinks she’s struck gold with Under Suspicion, a series that will reopen cold cases via interviews with the people who were on the scenes at the time, taped at the same places the bodies were found. Her first choice is obvious: The smothering 20 years ago of society hostess Betsy Bonner Powell during the night of the Graduation Gala she and her husband, hedge fund colossus Robert Nicholas Powell, threw for Betsy’s daughter Claire and her three high school buds. The criminal-reunion setup screams Agatha Christie (think Five Little Pigs or Sparkling Cyanide), but Clark adds some deliciously bitchy bickering to the proceedings once all four of the lead suspects improbably reveal their secrets and motives to an obliging blackmailer. St. Augustine realtor Regina Callari lost her father to suicide after he sunk his assets in Rob’s hedge fund. Cleveland pharmacist Alison Schaefer, married to a football player whose dream of sending her to medical school ended with his crippling by a hit-and-run driver, wonders if she killed Betsy while she was sleepwalking. Nina Craig, a failed actress eking out a living as a Hollywood extra, lives with a mother who’s driving her crazy. And Claire herself, not to be outdone, had good reason to hate both her mother and her stepfather. Will Laurie and her crew trick a confession out of one of them before the killer who’s been stalking her takes his shot?
Rest easy, Agatha: Clark (Daddy’s Gone A Hunting, 2013, etc.) can’t match your skill at spinning webs as logical as they are surprising. Along the way, however, few readers will be able to resist her creaky charm.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4906-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Those not knowing King’s Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King’s recent,...
Coauthors King and Straub, together again (The Talisman, 1984), take a Wisconsin Death Trip into parallel universes.
The Fisherman, who copycats long-dead serial killer Albert Fish, has been chopping up little kids in French Landing, Wisconsin, and sending letters to the children’s parents identical to those Fish sent parents 67 years ago—letters never made public, so how does The Fisherman do this? The local police chief asks for help from Jack Sawyer (hero of The Talisman), a Los Angeles homicide detective now in retirement. As a child, Jack flipped into the Territories, the parallel world in The Talisman, but has since forgotten his trip. What about the all-black Black House in the woods? Well, only Charles Burnside (Alzheimer’s) and Tinky Winky Judy Marshall (just plain crazy) know the Black House is the doorway to Abbalah, the entrance to hell—and Judy’s son Tyler is apparently the killer’s fourth victim. Jack’s new buddy, blind Henry Leyden, a radio deejay with four discrete identities no one knows are his, can’t talk Jack into taking the case. But when little Irma Freneau’s gnawed foot arrives in a shoebox on Jack’s welcome mat, Jack flips and lands in the Territories. The Territories confer a sacred magic and, in Jack’s case, absolute luck that lets him win his every bet or endeavor. Tyler, it happens, is telekinetic, and has been abducted by the Crimson King. All universes are held in place by the Dark Tower, the great interdimensional axle the Crimson King wants to destroy. Jack must save Tyler from the furnace-lands below Black House—and here the novel strives for depth, though interest dwindles.
Those not knowing King’s Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King’s recent, subtler work, though, may find these blood-spattered pages a step backward into dreamslash & gutspill.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50439-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A run-of-the-mill mystery that includes some welcome tips on the health benefits of chocolate.
An accountant and her lawyer husband must revisit his high school days in order to solve a murder.
Lee Woodyard is no fan of the scheme her husband, Joe, and her uncle, Hogan Jones, the local police chief, hatch to buy the Bailey house next door and flip it. But even though she’d rather be at her job as business manager at her aunt’s chocolate specialty shop (The Chocolate Bunny Brouhaha, 2016, etc.), she agrees to meet with the plumber for an estimate—a meeting that turns dangerous when plumber Digger Brown finds a bundle of rags in the cellar. When he drops them, a gun hidden in the bundle goes off, sending a bullet whizzing past Lee. No one seems to know where the old fashioned six-shooter came from, but the accident recalls a past incident in which the Sharks, a group of high school boys that included Brad Davis, Chip Brown, Sharpy Brock, Tad Bailey, and Spud Dirk, pulled a prank that could have been deadly. Years ago, when several Sharks pretended as a joke to rob a convenience store in which Brad was working, Brad pulled a real gun and fired but hit nothing more vital than the Frozen Rainbow Machine. Now Brad’s the president of the VanHorn–Davis Foundation, whose charitable donations underwrite many improvements to the Michigan lakeside town of Warner Pier. When Lee accompanies Hogan to the Bailey house to show him where the gun was, they find more than they bargained for—Spud’s corpse in a cupboard. Although Hogan’s the police chief, he must stay out of the investigation because Spud had been competing with him to buy the Bailey house. So Lee, who’d prefer to stick to chocolates, is forced to join Joe in detective work.
A run-of-the-mill mystery that includes some welcome tips on the health benefits of chocolate.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-10000-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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