The Yellow Menace returns in Crichton's shocking, didactic, enormously clever new mystery-thriller—only now he wears a three-piece suit and aims to dominate America through force of finance, not arms. "The Japanese can be tough," says one character here. "They say 'business is war,' and they mean it." How much they mean it Lt. Peter J. Smith, LAPD, learns when he's assigned to the murder of an American call-girl at the gala opening of the L.A. high-rise headquarters of the Japanese conglomerate Nakamoto. There, Smith butts heads with men whose alien mannerisms he can't interpret and who insist on their own "private inquiry." Fortunately, he's joined by legendary Japan-savvy cop John Connor, the real hero here, a Holmes to narrator Smith's Watson. At the crime scene and thereafter, Connor, whose love/hate for the Japanese stems from years lived in their land, interprets Japanese ways to Smith: "Control your gestures. Keep your hands at your sides. The Japanese find big arm movements threatening..." Connor's commentary is always fascinating but, as the serpentine case coils on, numerous instances of Japanese financial dirty dealing are cited by characters who disparage the Japanese sufficiently ("The Japanese don't believe in fair trade at all"; "Japanese corporations in America...think they're surrounded by savages") to bathe Smith—and the novel—in xenophobic paranoia: It's not by chance that the only likable Japanese here is a crippled beauty who fled to America because "to the Japanese, deformity is shameful." Crichton's coup is to preach within a breathtakingly supple plot hinging on doctored Nakamoto security videotapes that caught the killer at work, the deciphering of which takes place in lab-set scenes as technologically riveting as the best in Jurassic Park. And as suspenseful—for as Smith closes in on the killer and the huge-money stakes behind the crime, Nakamoto agents threaten his family, his career, and his life. Brilliantly calculated Japan-bashing that's bound, for better or for worse, to attract controversy and a huge readership.
Pub Date: March 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58942-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
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
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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