by Michael Connelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 3, 2014
Expect Bosch to uncover a nest of vipers as powerful as they are untouchable, but don’t expect him to emerge from his...
The latest and most intricate of Harry Bosch’s cold cases (The Black Box, 2012, etc.) begins with a victim who’s still cooling off in the morgue.
Orlando Merced was shot 10 years ago by a sniper who fired into his band, Los Reyes Jalisco, as it played on Mariachi Plaza. He’s just now died of blood poisoning, but the coroner’s office is calling it murder, since the cause was the bullet that’s been lodged in his body all these years. Ex–Los Angeles mayor Armando Zeyas, who can’t resist grandstanding on behalf of the dead man who played at his wedding, offers a $50,000 reward guaranteed to bring the crazies out of the woodwork, and one of the callers tells Bosch’s very junior new partner, Detective Lucia Soto, that the shooting is linked to a 1993 fire at the Bonnie Brae apartments that killed nine victims, most of them children. Since Soto survived that fire as a child and had friends who didn’t, she comes to full alert when the anonymous tipster claims Merced was killed because he knew who set the fire. The two crimes are both linked, it turns out, to another crime, the violent robbery of an EZBank the same day as the Bonnie Brae arson. Though the felonies may be ancient, Connelly (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) maintains a rapid pace, steadily increasing the tension even after the solution becomes obvious. Following Bosch’s trail is like watching Lew Archer in the glory days of Ross Macdonald, except Connelly’s focus is social, political and ultimately professional rather than psychological.
Expect Bosch to uncover a nest of vipers as powerful as they are untouchable, but don’t expect him to emerge from his Herculean labors a happy man.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-22593-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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 Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
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Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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