Low-intensity.
Jones draws on her nonfiction background (Birthmothers, 1993, etc.) to craft a thriller debut.
Someone is kidnapping or murdering the nannies of South Philadelphia—four in three weeks! One winter day divorced single mother Zoe Hayes sits outdoors with her adopted six-year-old daughter, Molly, who finds a severed finger with chipped red nail polish on the snowy curb. After being interviewed by Detective Nick Stiles, Zoe wails her woes to best friend Susan Cummings, an overloaded defense lawyer but pulled-together homemaker. Susan warns that her neighborhood is full of depravity, a thought echoed by Zoe’s bonkers elderly neighbor, Old Charlie. Now Claudia Rusk, the nanny for Susan’s next-door neighbor, is missing. Meanwhile, anxiety-ridden Zoe holds art therapy classes at The Institute, where she leads the deranged toward sanity through art. Jones throws suspects at us, including Coach Gene of Molly’s gymnastics class, Zoe’s ex-husband Michael, Susan’s always far-off husband Tim, leering construction workers and phobic neighbor Victor, who never leaves his house and rarely is spotted even at his windows. Zoe finds herself having an overnight with Detective Stiles, who gets along fine with Molly in the morning by making a pancake breakfast. But when Stiles won’t admit to more body parts being found, Zoe tries to dump him. A profile of the killer by fab personality and forensic psychiatrist Beverly Gardner points to the perp getting fearless, perhaps insinuating himself into the investigation, even leaving the finger Molly found pointing to Zoe’s house, as if to say her nanny, Angela, will be the next victim. The courtship and cooking scenes featuring Nick and Zoe have some zip, buddy Susan’s lawyerly acid and daughter Molly’s lively dialogue are pluses, but the tale moves into familiar and strained territory with a cross-dressing villain.
Low-intensity.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33038-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
Hoag finishes her crossover from sexy soft-cover romance to psychosexual thriller with this tale of tough Cajun loners looking for love in unlikely places. Heroine Annie Broussard is a deputy with the sheriff's office in Partout Parish in southern Louisiana. An orphan who's working hard to make detective, she's also devoted to getting rid of the sexual predators who victimize women. But just as her career seems to be looking up, Annie breaks an unwritten police law: She arrests a fellow officer, Nick Fourcade, when she finds him beating up a murder suspect. Annie should have let Fourcade kill him, say both her colleagues and the bayou parish citizens. After all, the suspect, Marcus Renard, had supposedly stalked Pam Bichon, a single mother. He'd driven stakes through her hands, raped her, killed her, eviscerated her, then left her wearing only a feathered Mardi Gras mask in a deserted cottage on Pony Bayou. Why not kill him? Switching his obsession from Pam to Annie, he maintains that he's innocent and begs Annie to help him. Working with Fourcade, who's suspended but still obsessed with the case, she seeks evidence to put the troubled Marcus legally behind bars. Meanwhile, someone's raping Louisiana women, and Marcus is too injured to be the perp. Is it Annie's lazy, mean-spirited colleague Stokes? Or Pam's husband, involved with a New Orleans racketeer from Fourcade's past? As Mardi Gras approaches, Annie, a cute kid who does 50 chin-ups a day and has an addiction to candy bars, wrestles with Fourcade's dangerous sexuality—fortunately a losing battle—and with the evil presence of deranged male predators that haunts so many recent suspense novels. Hoag (Guilty as Sin, 1996, etc.) is always a good gritty read, but this time a lack of sustained emotional tension makes the novel a long ride on soft tires.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-09960-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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