by Michael A. Black ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002
A brawny debut so foursquare in its characters and prose that you can hardly wait till Shade finally gets to put those...
Having lost his wife to overwork, his job with the Chicago Police Department to politics, his ancient car to natural causes, and his girlfriend to LA, private eye Ron Shade is about to give up his office—why keep it when he has no walk-in clients?—when his old friend, social worker Maria Castro, walks in. Her buddy Juanita’s fiancé, Carlos Sanchez, has disappeared from his job at Two Thousand and One: Space Oddities, and since he’s a Salvadoran illegal, Juanita doesn’t want to go to the police. By the end of Shade’s first visit to the storage facility, it’s pretty obvious what’s happened to Carlos and who’s responsible. But it takes a long time for Shade to trace the spreading stain of fraud, payoffs, and cover-ups as far as it reaches for several reasons: He’s busy training for the championship kickboxing fight an earlier job injury robbed him of; the theft of his spiffy new Camaro Z-28 robs him of his wheels just when he thinks he’s got nothing left to lose; the clunker he borrows as a replacement needs mechanical work every time he puts the key in the ignition; and his sudden, unexpected romance with Maria makes every hour he’s not spending with her feel like he’s playing hooky. It isn’t long, though, before he learns that fate held worse things in store for Carlos than deportation.
A brawny debut so foursquare in its characters and prose that you can hardly wait till Shade finally gets to put those kickboxing skills to use.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7862-4309-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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
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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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