by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2018
Clark and Burke (Every Breath You Take, 2017, etc.) develop their suspects with so much more subtlety and conviction than...
Under Suspicion producer Laurie Moran’s fifth dive into crimes past has to overcome a major obstacle: the reluctance of the leading suspect to participate in the enterprise.
When hotshot New York neurologist Dr. Martin Bell was shot when he was about to enter his home five years ago, suspicion immediately fixed on his wife. It’s not likely that Kendra Bell pulled the trigger since her children’s nanny, Caroline Radcliffe, recalls that she was once again so zoned out from depression or drinking or drugs at the time that the police had to struggle to awaken her enough to tell her that she was now a very wealthy widow. But Kendra could surely have hired a hit on the husband who’d talked her out of her own medical career by insisting, along with his smothering parents, that she stay home with the children. Now Robert and Cynthia Bell, a hard couple to like despite having lost their only child, want Laurie to reopen the case for her TV audience. Kendra, who’s never admitted to her in-laws that she refused from the beginning to cooperate with Under Suspicion, has told them instead that Laurie declined to reopen the case, and they plead stiffly with her to reconsider. Taking the interfering, normally unsympathetic Under Suspicion host Ryan Nichols with her, Laurie immediately calls on Kendra, threatens to tell the Bells the truth she’s concealed from them, and pressures her into allowing Laurie and her staff to take the case. She doesn’t know that Kendra’s been paying off an unknown blackmailer for five years, wondering every day, “Will I ever know if I had my husband killed?”
Clark and Burke (Every Breath You Take, 2017, etc.) develop their suspects with so much more subtlety and conviction than usual that the climactic revelation, which is more and less surprising than you’d expect, feels especially disappointing. Sometimes it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrest.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7166-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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