A readable thriller that doesn’t quite play fair.
Sibling rivalry gets out of hand.
In this slender thriller, Marinovich (The Winter Girl, 2016, etc.) pits Craig Krider against his brother, Rob. Egged on by their sadistic father, the boys grew up competing to see who could play the biggest, cruelest practical joke on the other. Anything was fair game, with three exceptions: “No mortal injury. Wait your turn. The game never ends.” Rob once gave Craig’s apartment a surprise renovation (read: rendered it uninhabitable). Craig later slept with Rob’s wife, Rebecca, on their wedding day. And so on. When the novel begins, Rebecca shows up at Craig’s wedding and announces that Rob has died in a car accident. She blames Craig and vows to continue the game herself. The story moves along briskly from there, and Marinovich’s prose is light-footed, at times even artful: A man lies in the road with “his arms stretched out behind his head as if he were surrendering to the empty blue sky.” In keeping with the thriller genre, the plot winds this way and that on its way to the obligatory big twist. If all goes well, the twist ought to come as a complete surprise and, in retrospect, seem inevitable. That isn’t the case here. Marinovich shuttles back and forth between Craig's and Rebecca’s points of view, with each chapter narrated by one or the other. Naturally they’re trying to fool each other, but one of them is also deceiving the reader—for no good reason. Of course, mystery and thriller writers are always trying to trick their readers, but the reader must have all the relevant information, or at the least receive no outright false information (as we do here). Otherwise the game is rigged, and the novelist only wins by cheating.
A readable thriller that doesn’t quite play fair.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945293-74-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Adaptive Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gloriously exciting yarn whose spell will end the moment you turn the last page.
What’s worse than learning that your wife’s been abducted and murdered by a madman? Learning that she hasn’t—in this taut, twisty dose of suspenseful hokum from the gifted chronicler of sleuthing sports-agent Myron Bolitar (Darkest Fear, 2000, etc.).
For all the pain Manhattan pediatrician Dr. David Beck has suffered in the eight years since his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth, his bride of seven months, was torn away from him and later found dead, the case itself was open and shut: She was tortured, branded, and slain by the perp calling himself KillRoy, now doing life on 14 counts of homicide. But the case pops open again with the discovery of two corpses buried near the murder site, along with the baseball bat that was used to incapacitate Beck during the abduction, and with a jolting e-mail Beck’s received from somebody who looks just like Elizabeth. If the message is bogus, how was it faked? And if it’s genuine, why has Elizabeth been hiding for eight years, why has she come back now, and whose body did her father, New York homicide cop Hoyt Parker, identify as hers and bury in her grave? A face-to-face rendezvous that Beck’s mysterious correspondent sets up in Washington Square promises answers—but when it’s time for the meeting, Beck is being hunted by the police for a murder a lot less than eight years old. Aided by celebrity lawyer Hester Crimstein, grateful drug-dealer Tyrese Barton, and his own sister Linda’s lover—that glamorous plus-size model Shauna—Beck goes up against even more improbable foes, from ruthless zillionaire developer Griffin Scope to bare-hands killer Eric Wu, in a quest for answers that’ll have you burning the midnight oil till 3:00
Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33555-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.
Jance offers that rare—and welcome—hybrid: the suspense novel with heart.
Jonathan Southard is one of those unhappy men whose unrequited love affair with life has caused a volatile, long-term, internal simmering. One day the mixture explodes, resulting in a crime that is both horrific and, in a sense at least, foreseeable. He shoots his wife, her dog and their two young children, construing this last as an act of mercy inasmuch as it will spare them an aftermath of humiliation and shame. Having wiped out his San Diego family, he sets off for Tucson and the home of his mother, planning to clean the slate. He’s always hated Abby Tennant, attributing to her voluminous maternal shortcomings, of which she is largely innocent. With less difficulty than Southard expected, the bodies are discovered, clues are put together, identities established and soon enough the manhunt is on, participated in by multiple police forces from several states. Among these are the elite Shadow Wolves, Indians who patrol reservation land near the Mexican border. Enter Dan Pardeey. Half Anglo, half Apache, he has a special connection to the small survivor of another of Southard’s monstrous crimes. Angelina Enos, age four, has remained alive only by virtue of being tiny enough to escape notice. Eerily, this parallels Pardee’s own long-ago experience, and when she reaches out to him he has no choice but to respond. Because he does, his life is irrevocably changed and, in a kind of chain reaction, so are the lives of a variety of other players, one way or another, for good or ill, in Jance’s absorbing cast.
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-123924-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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