One of the most convoluted and striking in this venerable series (Death of a Ghost, 2017, etc.), whose fans will relish the...
Honesty may not be the best policy if it makes your acquaintances want to kill you.
Sgt. Hamish Macbeth is enjoying the beauty of the Scottish Highlands along with his constable, Charlie Carter, when a trip to see a newcomer to the area ruins their day and many more. Although banker Paul English has only recently retired to the village of Cnothan, he’s already made an impressive number of enemies. Hamish soon sees why when English accuses him of dyeing his hair red. A youngster from Cnothan claims to have seen English in a compromising position with minister Maisie Walters, but she denies the story. All the while, the list of people English has insulted or defamed grows every day. DCI Blair, whose hatred for Hamish knows no bounds, is delighted to visit English when he calls to complain that the local police have been harassing him, only to be insulted and threatened himself for drinking on duty. The discovery of English’s body in a bog flushes out a legion of suspects. When Charlie, who’s giving up policing to move with his love to a croft in South Uist, departs, Hamish’s new constable is a reluctant spy for Blair. Hamish, who’s never gotten over having to release Sonsie, his wild cat, into a sanctuary, has found the company of Lugs and Sally, his two dogs, an incomplete substitute. So when a wild cat is shot, he rescues it, certain that it’s Sonsie even though everyone from his former girlfriends to the veterinarian says it’s not. The rescue fills Hamish with joy and makes him doubly determined to solve the murder of the man everyone loved to hate.
One of the most convoluted and striking in this venerable series (Death of a Ghost, 2017, etc.), whose fans will relish the newest complications in the hero’s chaotic life.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5831-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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